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In Azure

Microsoft Dev Box and Dynamics 365 F&O local development

14 December, 2023 14 Mins Read

After a long, long, long, long, long time waiting for it, the Dynamics 365 F&O local development feature is finally here… in public preview. It’s a bit different since the first time we heard about this at the MBAS in 2019… but it opens up a new scenario for developers.

I won’t go into much detail about the new unified developer experience, which is its name now, but if you want to know what you need to use it and how to configure it, you can read this blog post from Aurélien Clere: Dynamics 365 FinOps Unified developer experience.

Today I’ll explain what Microsoft Dev Box is and how we can use it with the Dynamics 365 F&O local development tools. We will also learn about the cost, and in which scenarios we could benefit from Microsoft Dev Box as our development environment. You know, the best of both worlds, or the worst… 🤣

But first…

In Azure

Microsoft Sentinel for Dynamics 365 F&O

19 July, 2023 10 Mins Read

Today I’m bringing you a post that’s all about Dynamics 365 F&O, but the main focus is on security, specifically Microsoft Sentinel. Some days ago it was announced a Microsoft Sentinel Solution for F&O had been published and is currently in preview. Let’s learn a bit about it!

Sometimes we overlook the security aspects of the things that are not directly related to F&O, specially regarding resources like networking, storage accounts, dev VMs, Microsoft Entra ID (this is Azure AD’s new name!) or using Bastion.

And we don’t do that because we just don’t care about security, but because we’re Dynamics 365 people, and sometimes we might lack the knowledge in other things. If you’re lucky, you’ll have an in-house security team that’ll take care of that, otherwise we need to train ourselves a bit.

This is the first time I’ve used Microsoft Sentinel, and I’m for sure missing on a lot of things and features. Time to learn!

In Dynamics 365

F&O alert emails in Power Automate

10 July, 2023 7 Mins Read

There’s a nice feature in Dynamics 365 F&O that lets us emit notifications when data is changed, created or deleted: the alert framework.

In this post, I will show you how to send the alerts as Business events and send emails notifying the users using a Power Automate flow.

When I was almost done writing this blog post, I found this blog post and video from Scott Gaines where he showed this scenario. Take a look at it for a clearer step-by-step guide: Using Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Alerts to Trigger Power Automate Flows.

In Dynamics 365

ISV License Generator v0.6 released

16 March, 2023 2 Mins Read

Yesterday I released a new version of ISV License Generator with full support for the SHA-256 hash function after fixing an issue with it.

What’s new in ISV License Generator?

In this new version the support to generate Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations licenses using the SHA-1 hash has been removed, and it will use SHA-256 by default as the AXUtil tool does.

In X++

Create a Dynamics 365 F&O encrypted field

8 March, 2023 4 Mins Read

Today we have a quick and easy X++ post where we’ll learn how to create an encrypted field in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

Creating an encrypted field in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations is a simple process that can help secure sensitive information in your application. By using an encryption key to encrypt the data, it ensures that the data remains safe even if it is accessed by unauthorized users.

In Azure

Dynamics 365 F&O and firewalls: monitor Azure IP ranges

9 February, 2023 9 Mins Read

If you’re integrating Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations with 3rd parties, and your organization or the 3rd party one are using a firewall, you might’ve found yourself in the scenario of being asked “which is the production/sandbox IP address?”.

Well, we don’t know. We know which IP it has now, but we don’t know if it will have the same IP in the future, you will have to monitor this if you plan on opening single IPs. This is something Dag Calafell wrote about on his blog: Static IP not guaranteed for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

So, what should I do if I have a firewall and need to allow access to/from Dynamics 365 F&O or any other Azure service? The network team usually doesn’t like the answer: if you can’t allow a FQDN, you should open all the address ranges for the datacenter and service you want to access. And that’s a lot of addresses that make the network team sad.

In today’s post, I’ll show you a way to keep an eye on the ranges provided by Microsoft, and hopefully make our life easier.

WARNING: due to this LinkedIn comment, I want to remark that the ranges you can find using this method are for INBOUND communication into Dynamics 365 or whatever service. For outbound communication, check this on Learn: For my Microsoft-managed environments, I have external components that have dependencies on an explicit outbound IP safe list. How can I ensure my service is not impacted after the move to self-service deployment?

In Dynamics 365

2023 Release Wave 1 plans: what’s new?

25 January, 2023 5 Mins Read

It’s already that time of the year again, the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1 plans have just been released!

The 2023 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations is focused on improving the development, administration, and user experiences by removing barriers, tightening integrations, and enhancing cross-platform capabilities. This release will bring a range of new features and capabilities that will help improve the performance of the platform and enhance the overall experience for developers, administrators, and end-users.

The features described here are planned to be delivered from April to September 2023.

In Azure

Configure Azure Bastion for Dynamics 365 F&O VMs

17 January, 2023 8 Mins Read

We’ve been working with the F&O development VMs for a long time, specially Microsoft partners that need to be able to quickly and easily change between different customer environments, and using the VHD is a bit more complicated in that scenario.

And of course, we use Remote Desktop Protocol to connect to these VMs. RDP is insecure due to its weak encryption, widespread use, and the lack of security features built-in to the protocol. So hackers often target RDP to gain unauthorized access to systems. You can learn more about securing your VMs in Best practices for defending Azure Virtual Machines.

Today, we will walk through the steps of configuring Azure Bastion for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations development VMs.

In Azure

IaC with Bicep: deploy Azure API Management Architecture

13 September, 2022 11 Mins Read

In the previous post, we learned about my proposal of an architecture for Azure API Management for integrations. And I closed the post with a pending thing, which was details on how to deploy and configure all the Azure resources the solution uses.

And in today’s post we’re going to see how all the resources are created, linked together and configured to have a fully working API logging solution, and how we can deploy everything using Bicep.

In Azure

Azure API Management for your integrations

6 September, 2022 8 Mins Read

I’m back with additional information about Azure API Management! More Azure content, and I’ll probably continue to produce posts regarding Azure in the future.

I believe there are numerous ways to learn new things, and for me, two of them are writing blog posts and using new technologies to solve problems at work. Of course, my goal is to attempt to apply the Azure themes I write about to Dynamics 365.

Today, I’m presenting an architecture approach for integrations, leveraging API Management and various other Azure components, for Dynamics 365 or anything else that has an endpoint.

You can read the second part of this post: IaC with Bicep: deploy Azure API Management Architecture.