The Dynamics GP Blogster

In the previous 3 articles of the series, I talked about the rationale for selecting a container based environment for development purposes, we also installed Docker and downloaded and installed the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central containers for Docker. This then set us on a path to installing the development IDE and selecting a source code control provider to host our AL solutions. See: #MSDYN365BC: Building a Development Environment for Microsoft Dynamics GP ISVs Part 1/3 #MSDYN365BC: Building a Development Environment for Microsoft Dynamics GP ISVs Part 2/3 #MSDYN365BC: Building a Development Environment for Microsoft Dynamics GP ISVs Part 3/3 This article in particular, will focus on the installation of Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and the AL language extensions for the environment. Installing VS Code VS Code is to BC developers what Dexterity is to Dynamics GP developers. VS Code provides the IDE required to incorporate the AL language extensions to develo...

In Part 2 of this series, we covered the full installation of Docker Desktop, used to run the Dynamics 365 Business Central containers. We also saw how to use PowerShell to enable both the Hyper-V and Containers features on Windows 10. This article will focus on the installation and troubleshooting of the Dynamics 365 Business Central containers and will provide step by step instructions on how to accomplish this. Remember, there are quite a bit of resources out there, so here they are: Get started with the Container Sandbox Development Environment Running a Container-Based Development Environment But the goal of this series is to help Microsoft Dynamics GP ISVs draw similarities and contrasts with their multi-developer Microsoft Dexterity development environments. Now that Docker is been installed, we can effectively proceed to lay down the BC containers. This will create a full virtualized environment with all the BC components needed for development purposes. This equates...

In Part 1 of this series, I outlined the principles and detailed the reasoning behind why we chose to build our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central development environment using Windows Docker containers. In the Dynamics GP world, we are not quite used to containers, so let me start with the definition, straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak). According to the wizards over at Docker, "A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings" . The first thing to highlight from the definition is, "standard unit of software" . In fact, that's key to this whole thing! Standardization ensures that every developer in the organizatio...

This is my first foray into the world of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) development and this series of articles is meant to help Microsoft Dynamics GP ISVs understand the process of building a BC development environment, identify similarities with a Dynamics GP development environment, and fully utilize your accumulated experience. Yes, there's tons of literature out there, but none have the perspective of a GP ISV, so there's that 😋 It is worth noting that I am a 20+ years Microsoft Dexterity developer and, as we say, "we do things a little different around here" in the Dex world, but I am very excited to be initiating this new chapter in my career. As you all know, at this point in my life I manage the Software Engineering team at Mekorma and as a long time Microsoft Dexterity developer they were a few things I knew I wanted out of this new development environment: Isolation From an engineering perspective, this means that each developer ne...

As of recent, I've been honing on my Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) skills, without leaving my beloved Microsoft Dynamics GP behind. One of the things that I have been working on is making sure customers understand the BI insights gained via data replication between the two systems. As a result, I am always working through the replication configuration a few times a month. Yesterday, I removed a previous Fabrikam company created via replication from BC and attempted a new replication - If you are not familiar with the configuration of the data replication process between GP and BC, I will be creating a video on this soon, so please stay tuned. NOTE: The integration runtime service has also been updated, so you will probably need to download a new version. After setting up the Integration Runtime Service and clicking Next to establish the connection between Intelligent Cloud and my on-premises GP, I received the following error: "SQL database must be a...