Waldo's Blog

I’m not writing a blog about every single (new) command in my “CRS AL Language Extension” . But this Sunday, I added an interesting one. One that I should have had created for a long time – but simply didn’t think of it, until Daniel ( TheDenster.com ) explicitly asked for it on GitHub. Just imagine, you’re building an app, with many pages, and you want to build a page, test it, build the next one, test it .. . You kind have to: – Publish the app – Run the object after the app was published The request was simple: combine both steps in one command in VSCode: Publish & Run Current Object …

This is my first post of 2021, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish all of you all the best, all the health, all the safety, and .. may we finally meet again in person in 2021 ! I’d be very happy to have much less of this: And more of this: Anyway ;-). Let’s get to the topic.. I got an internal question from our consultants on how they are able to access the license information of the customer for an OnPrem customer. There are a few scenarios where that’s interesting. Just to check which license is in production. Or how many objects or users did they buy. Well …

You might already have seen my session on DynamicsCon about Design Patterns. During that session, I mentioned a tool “mdAL”. If not .. well, here it is (starting at the mdAL part): This tool has seen some major updates – time to blog about it. ;-). Disclaimer I am not the developer of this tool – so not a single credit should go my way. The main developer of this tool is Jonathan Neugebauer, a German genius who made this for his master thesis, and who is putting this out there for free for us to benefit from. And I promise: we can benefit from this .. a lot! I just discovered…

You might wonder: why would I need this? Why would I need to download source code of Business Central, while I can simply access it through the symbols when I’m working in VSCode – or even better, while I can simply click the symbol, and look at the code from there? Well … Searchability Didn’t you ever wonder: “hey, previous version, this codeunit was still in this app – where is it now”? Or something in the line of: “Where can I find an example of a test-codeunit where they create and post picks”? In the old days, it was easy to get to the source code. It was simply an “export all…

Quite honestly, I’m fully into the process of getting our apps (about 30 of them) to AppSource. We chose to have OnPrem implementations first, basically to get the experience, and also because it just still sells better in Belgium (immediate market ;-)). Anyway .. Recently, there was a call with Microsoft with the topic “what to do in order to pass technical validation”. Given my current state – quite interesting to me, obviously ;-). It was a very good presentation from Freddy, with a clear overview of how Microsoft handled it in the past, how it’s handling it now .. and what to expect in the…

A few days ago, we upgraded our product from 17.0 to 17.1. We had been looking forward to this release, because we usually never release a product or customer on an RTM release of Business Central. So .. finally 17.1, finally we could continue to upgrade the product and start releasing this to customers before the end of the year. While this was just a minor upgrade .. things started to fail. We have quite some apps to build, and some of them had many failing tests. All these failing tests for just a minor upgrade? That never happened before. What happened? Well … From Microsoft…

If you’ve been following the latest and greatest from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must be aware about “ what’s cooking in Microsoft’s Lab “. In short, Microsoft is working on a possibility to generate a DGML file for your extension that you’re compiling. A DGML file is basically a file that contains all code cross references. Remember “where used” .. well .. that! I can only recommend to watch Vincent ‘s session “ BCLE237 From the lab: What’s on the drawing board for Dynamics 365 Business Central ” from Microsoft’s Virtual Launch Event . You’ll see that you’ll be able to generate…

Recently, we have been going through upgrading our 65 apps to the newest release (v17). You might wonder: upgrade? Wasn’t this supposed to be seemless? Well, let me explain what we did, how we handle stuff internally – and then maybe it does make sense to you why we take the steps we took for upgrades like this. DevOps It seems I can’t stop talking about DevOps ;-). Well, it’s the one thing that “keeps us safe” regarding: Code quality Succeeding tests Breaking changes Conflicting number ranges … (and SO MUCH MORE ) You have to understand, in a big development team, you…

Just a small reminder for you that yet another major release has been thrown our direction: v17 aka “ Business Central 2020 Release Wave 2 “. Old news, I know. But I blame the pandemic ;-). I already blogged about this upcoming release , and basically the list is quite the same. In fact, besides the official Microsoft Docs documentation , Natalie Karolak shared a smart way to filter for all new features that came out with this Wave 2 release on Microsoft Docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/search/?terms=%22APPLIES%20TO%3A%20Business%20Central%202020%20release%20wave%202%20and%20later…

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…