Today I’m announcing the first part of the new Dynamics 365 ALM guide for Finance and Operations (F&O) is now available!
Table of Contents
This guide focuses on the unified development and administration experiences and the significant changes coming in the next few months. I’ve completely rewritten it from scratch, ensuring that all screenshots are up-to-date to make the process easier to follow.
Over time, countless changes have impacted ALM for Dynamics 365. After writing the original ALM posts, I realized it was more efficient to create a new guide rather than amend the old content. Believe me, it’s easier to write from the beginning than reviewing what I already have…
The previous guide covered everything essential for maintaining a healthy Dynamics 365 ALM process for Finance and Operations projects. While much of that information remains relevant, some updates—especially with Azure DevOps—reflect the latest advancements.
One of the biggest shifts is the deprecation of Lifecycle Services (LCS) and the transition to the Power Platform admin center (PPAC). This change introduces new tools and workflows we need to adapt to for effective ALM.
What’s New in the Dynamics 365 ALM Guide?
With the new Unified development and administration experiences, here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming:
- PPAC (say goodbye to LCS)
- Power Platform tools for DevOps
- The new “local” development experience
- Use Git in a very straightforward way
- Deploy to production from a release pipeline… yes, you read well, “deploy to production”, that’s correct 😁
- Automating operations with PAC CLI or PowerShell
The new guide will offer step-by-step instructions for implementing these tools and workflows. Initially, the focus will be on Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, but my goal is to expand it to cover a fully unified ALM strategy that includes both ERP and Dataverse projects.
I can’t wait to dive into this journey with you. Let’s embrace the new Dynamics 365 ALM era together!
What’s now available?
Currently, the Dynamics 365 ALM guide is a work-in-progress. The first chapters have been written, and I’ve got drafts of the next ones.
Here’s what’s available now:
Welcome to the new ALM guide
An introduction to the new Dynamics 365 ALM guide and the prerequisites needed to follow along.
Create and prepare Azure DevOps organization and project
This chapter explains how to create a DevOps organization and project from scratch. If your company doesn’t have a DevOps organization, you’ll learn how to create one and add a project.
- Enable TFVC in a new organization (since Microsoft defaults to Git now).
- Configure pipeline agents with an Azure subscription to add more parallel jobs.
Unified development environment
Introducing one of the most exciting features: the unified developer experience (UDE). Learn how to deploy a new development environment in Dataverse using PowerShell or the PPAC UI.
We’ll also discuss the transition to the capacity-based model. 🤐
Using Visual Studio
This chapter covers using Visual Studio 2022 to develop X++ code, pushing changes to Dataverse, and debugging. (Still a work in progress.)
This is the currently available content in the new Dynamics 365 ALM guide, but I’m preparing many more things!
What’s Planned Next?
The missing parts for the Dynamics 365 ALM guide and what I have in my mind are:
- Git basics: just some words on Git. Using it in our projects will be much easier with the UDEs, and it’s worth learning how to create branches, change between branches, or other basic operations.
- Pipelines: CI and CD pipelines. Including deploying to production using the Power Platform tasks in releases😍 Oh, and forget about the LCS connector with a username and password… say hello to service principals!
- Further automation: like in the old guide, I will describe how we can use pipelines to automate certain processes like copying environments.
- PPAC-focused topics: with the move to PPAC we must learn plenty of new things. How to check the capacity, manage environments, provide access to users, etc.
This guide has been long in the making, but I hope it will be just as useful as the first one was. Stay tuned for more updates!
