Microsoft Dynamics 365 / Power Platform

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Feb 27, 2021 - Use The New Packaging in the Legacy Build Pipeline

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

The legacy pipeline from the build VM has its own PowerShell script that generates the packages. However, it always puts the F&O platform version into the package file name which can make it more difficult to use release pipelines or including ISV licenses into your packages since the version number changes with each update, requiring you to update your pipeline settings (and finding out the actual build number to use). Continue reading below or watch the YouTube video to learn how to swap the packaging step from the legacy pipeline with the Azure DevOps task which lets you specify your own name for the deployable package zip file. You can find the official documentation on the packaging step here.

Jan 27, 2021 - ISV Licenses in Packages

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

ISV licenses for Dynamics 365 F&O can only be applied using deployable packages. There are ISV license packages that only contain a license, and there are combined packages that have both the binaries as well as the license. But now with all-in-one packages on self-service environments, you can only apply the license as part of an all-in-one package. So what are your options? Check out my YouTube video and/or read on for more details.

Jan 23, 2021 - Updating The Legacy Pipeline for Visual Studio 2017

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

With the upcoming April 2021 release, support for Visual Studio 2015 will be dropped. If you’re building your code using a build VM deployed from LCS, you’re using the legacy pipeline. You will have to manually update your build pipeline tasks to use the new version. The steps are fairly simple and outlined in this official docs article. I have a quick video on YouTube to walk you through this as well. There is one little flag that could trip you up, however.

Jan 18, 2021 - Including ISV Binaries in Your Package

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

Many ISVs supply their Dynamics 365 Finance / Supply Chain solutions in a deployable package, which only contains binaries. With the current enforcement (“all-in-one package”) of a long-standing best practice to deploy all code together all the time, some customers are only now faced with figuring out how to “repackage” an ISV’s binaries into their own package. In this post I will outline a few gotchas in addition to the official documentation, for both the legacy build pipeline and the new build pipeline. You can also watch a quick overview video I made here on YouTube.

Oct 31, 2019 - Pushing, Dragging or Pulling an Industry Forward

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

Quite a few years ago, in my previous job when I was an MVP still, I did an online webinar for the AXUG called “Putting Software Engineering back in Dynamics AX” (in 2014). Admittedly it was somewhat of a rant / soap box type of talk. I guess “food for thought” would be a more optimistic characterization. I did try to inject some humor into the otherwise ranty slides by adding some graphics. At the time we were building out our X++ development team and we were heavily vested in TFS and automation, and I was very keen on sharing our lightbulb moments and those “why did we only start doing this now” revelations.

Oct 11, 2019 - Debugging woes with symbols: bug or feature?

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

I’ve struggled with this myself for a while during the betas of “AX7”. Sometimes, symbols aren’t loaded for your code and your breakpoints aren’t hit. It’s clear that the Dynamics 365 option “Only load symbols for your solution” has something to do with it, but still there’s strange behavior. It took me a few years at Microsoft for someone to explain the exact logic there. Since I’ve been sitting on this knowledge for a while and I’ve recently ran into some customer calls where debugging trouble was brought up, I realized it’s overdue for me to share this knowledge.

Mar 25, 2019 - Repost: Pointing Build Definitions to Specific VMs (agents)

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

Since the AXDEVALM blog has been removed from MSDN, I will repost the agent computer name post here AS-IS, until we can get better official documentation. Original post: October 20, 2017

Feb 19, 2019 - Repost: Enabling X++ Code Coverage in Visual Studio and Automated Build

Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

Since the AXDEVALM blog has been removed from MSDN, I will repost the code coverage blog post here AS-IS (other than wrong capitalization in the XML code), until we can get better official documentation. Note that after this was published, I received a mixed response from developers. For many it worked, for others this did not work at all no matter what they tried… I have not been able to spend more time on investigating why for some people this doesn’t work. Original post: March 28, 2018