Book Image

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

By : Stefano Demiliani, Duilio Tacconi
Book Image

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

By: Stefano Demiliani, Duilio Tacconi

Overview of this book

Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one business management solution, which is easy to adopt and helps you make smarter business decisions. This book is a comprehensive guide to developing solutions with Microsoft ERP (in the cloud and also on-premises). It covers all aspects of developing extensions, right from preparing a sandbox environment to deploying a complete solution. The book starts by introducing you to the Dynamics 365 Business Central platform and the new Modern Development Environment. You'll then explore the sandbox concept, and see how to create sandboxes for development. As you advance, you’ll be able to build a complete advanced solution for Dynamics 365 Business Central with AL language and Visual Studio Code. You'll then learn how to debug and deploy the extension and write automatic testing. The book will also take you through advanced topics like integration (with Azure Functions, web services, and APIs), DevOps and CI/CD techniques, and machine learning. You'll discover how Dynamics 365 Business Central can be used with Office 365 apps. Finally, you'll analyze different ways to move existing solutions to the new development model based on extensions. By the end of this book, you'll be able to develop highly customized solutions that meet the requirements of modern businesses using Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Dynamics 365 Business Central - Platform Overview and the Basics of Modern Development
5
Section 2: Developing Extensions for Dynamics 365 Business Central
10
Section 3: Debugging, Testing, and Release Management (DevOps)
15
Section 4: Advanced Integrations with Dynamics 365 Business Central
20
Section 5: Moving Solutions to the New Extension Model

Understanding Azure DevOps Pipelines

Because the life cycle of business case apps is short and the cadence with which you are deploying new versions should be much higher than in the past (before the AL era), you cannot build, test, and deploy the app manually.

To automate this part of the life cycle, you can use Azure DevOps Pipelines, which will build, test, and deploy for you. You feed the pipeline on one side with the source code you are producing, and at the other end, you have a tested application, which can be even automatically delivered or deployed. Right now, there are two types of pipeline:

  • Build pipeline: The input is the source code, and the output is the application and other artifacts.
  • Release pipeline: The input is the output produced by the build pipeline, and the output is a tested application delivered or deployed to selected places.

The plan is...