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

Basic concepts regarding extensions

As you already know, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS, you don't have access to the database or to the standard base code (this is different in the on-premise version, where you can still have access to the base code, and modifying that core is your responsibility). In the SaaS world, you cannot alter the database schema and cannot alter the standard business logic.

In the previous versions of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP, we have always talked about code modification. In the SaaS world, we have to start thinking about a new concept: code extension. To customize Dynamics 365 Business Central, you have to create extensions.

An extension (according to Microsoft's guidelines) is defined as an installable feature built in a way that it does not directly alter source resources and that is distributed as a preconfigured package...