Waldo's Blog

You must have seen this blog post from Microsoft: Maintain AppSource apps and per-tenant extensions in Dynamics 365 Business Central (online) And/or this blog of AJ : Business Central App maintenance policy tightened And/or this post from James : SaaS enables progress, why block it? If you didn’t, please do. Because as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner, your job does not end with “being able to implement some customizations at a customer”. No . When you create apps – these apps will live at a customer that most probably will have continuous updates. And to quote…

You are probably aware on how “secrets” work in AzureDevops. In a way, it’s simple: you can create variables, and store the value of the variable as a secret or not, simply by tapping the “lock” when creating a variable. To share variables over multiple repos, you can create a variable group, and use that variable group in multiple pipelines. Quite Easy! But … Thing is – out-of-the-box variable-definition in DevOps – as far as I know – is “just” on project-level. We can define variables on a pipeline, we can pass to templates, we can create “global” variables and such … but…

A question I get a lot – especially from people that come from C/AL, and only take their first steps into AL – is: How do I get to Microsoft’s source code of the BaseApp (and other) ? Well, there are multiple ways, really. You can download symbols, and unpack the symbols. You can download the DVD and get to the code on the DVD, or… You can simply download the artifacts And with “the artifacts”, I mean the artifacts that are used to build your Docker images . If you’re already building your Docker containers based on the artifacts, you probably already have them on your system! If not…

I have yet another option for you that might be interesting for you to handle the artifacts that Microsoft (Freddy) is providing in stead of actual Docker Images on a Docker Registry. What changed? Well, this shouldn’t be new to you anymore. You must have read the numerous blogposts from Freddy announcing a new way of working with Docker. No? You can find everything on his blog . Let me try to summarize all of this in a few sentences: Microsoft can’t just keep providing you the Docker images like they have beein doing. With all the versions, localizations .. and mainly the countless…

I just wanted to raise some attention to a new Conference in town: DynamicsCon . Quite interesting, because it’s perfectly aligned with the current world situation regarding COVID-19 issues: it’s a virtual event .. and it’s free! I’m not saying I prefer virtual events. I don’t. But given the circumstances, I guess it makes sense – and some advantages as well: you will be able to see all content, all sessions are pre-recorded (which means: demos will work ;-)), and you can do it within your living room without losing any time on traveling. Now, the committee is handling this really…

You might have read my previous blog on DevOps build agents . Since then, I’ve been quite busy with DevOps – and especially with ALOps . And I had to conclude that one big bottleneck keeps being the same: a decent (stable) installation of a DevOps Build server that supports Docker with the images from Microsoft. Or in many cases: a decent build agent that supports Docker – not even having to do anything with the images from Microsoft. You probably have read about Microsoft’s new approach on providing images being: Microsoft is not going to provide you any images any more, but will help you in…

You might have read my previous blog on DevOps build agents . Since then, I’ve been quite busy with DevOps – and especially with ALOps . And I had to conclude that one big bottleneck keeps being the same: a decent (stable) installation of a DevOps Build server that supports Docker with the images from Microsoft. Or in many cases: a decent build agent that supports Docker – not even having to do anything with the images from Microsoft. You probably have read about Microsoft’s new approach on providing images being: Microsoft is not going to provide you any images any more, but will help you in…

That’s right. It’s time again for the next round of features that Microsoft is planning for the next major release. It’s weird this time, lacking most info from conferences .. the kind of “silent” release of Wave 1 .. it’s almost like flying blind. Although, there is a crapload of information online. And of course, don’t forget Microsoft’s Virtual Conference from June 3rd.  Since I’m still focusing on Business Central – I’m only going to cover that part .. but do know that the entire “Dynamics 365” stack has a release for Wave 2 . Business central-related information can be found here: https…

You might have read my previous blogpost on how to enable the “external deployment” in an OnPrem Business Central environment . Well, that post deserved an “extension” as I didn’t provide examples on how to deploy with PowerShell – which you would be able to do within Azure DevOps. Scenario The scenario is still the same: you have all these OnPrem customers, where you would like to deploy your apps to. Microsoft is clear: just install a DevOps agent on all those customers. The alternative that I try to give is – well, don’t install the devops agent, but just make “External Deployment…

It seems that lately, I’m only able to blog about something when I have a tool to share.. . That needs to change .. :-/. But not today . Today, I’m going to share yet another tool that we at the ALOps -team have been working on to serve many of our customers. And we decided to share it with the community. The tool is free , it will stay free … but, there is a … Disclaimer The tool is a hack, nothing more than that. We simulate the behavior of what we think happens on the SaaS environment when you upload an Extension through the Automation API . So, the tool is “as is”, there is no official…