In today’s post, I want to talk about using Azure API Management (APIM) along Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.
Azure API Management is a hybrid, multi-cloud management platform for APIs across all environments. This means that, after deploying an APIM account, you can create an API that can serve services from one system or multiple.
So three days ago I took a look at the new 10.0.25 features currently in the PEAP program, calmly scrolling through until I saw something about custom scripts on prod, something that read:
Run custom X++ scripts with zero downtime
You can imagine my face when I read this. At the beginning I was confused, then surprised and then confused again. After reading the description, the situation wouldn’t get better:
This feature lets you upload and run deployable packages that contain custom X++ scripts without having to go through Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) or suspend your system. Therefore, you can correct minor data inconsistences without causing any disruptive downtime.
Are we getting a way to run custom code in production without having to deploy it? Yes we are. As many people have said these past two days: “X++ jobs are back!”. And there are a lot of discussions going on about the custom scripts feature.
The year 2021 has almost come to an end, and it’s time to review the changes we’ve had this past year.
So in case you’ve missed something, I hope you can find it here, although I won’t include all new or changed Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations features, only some of them, the ones I’ve found more interesting.
There’s a new version and a new task for our release pipelines that use the Azure-hosted agents. These changes have been introduced recently to support the new MSAL authentication libraries for the LCS service connection used to upload and deploy the deployable packages.
The current service connections use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Authentication Library (ADAL), and support for ADAL will end in June 2022.
This means that if we don’t update the Asset Upload and Asset Deployment to their new versions (1.* and 2.* respectively) the release pipelines could stop working after 30th June 2022.
Now that Microsoft will also update additional Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Sandbox environments, partners and customers will only need to take care of updating cloud-hosted environments, as we’ve always done.
I’m sure each team manages this differently, maybe leaving it to each developer to update their VM, or there’s someone in the customer or partner side that will do it. That’s in the best cases, maybe nobody is updating the developer machines…
If you want to know more about builds, releases, and the Dev ALM of Dynamics 365 you can read my full guide on MSDyn365 & Azure DevOps ALM.
Today, I’m bringing you a PowerShell script that you can run in a pipeline that will automatically update all your developer virtual machines!
Creating a package or a model is one of the first things we’ll do when starting to code in a new project.
It’s something very basic, but I’m still seeing some issues around this, bad practices that can lead to problems in the future.
Need to get the price of an item that has a sales or purchase agreement? The PriceDisc class is here to save us! This is one of those reference posts that I’m writing for the Adrià of the future, because it’s something I forget about a lot. PriceDisc magic! There’s an obsolete method, I think it was findItemPriceAgreement, to get the price, but it’s obsolete, as I’ve just said. So the easiest way to get…
It’s been some time since I wrote “Is Dataverse the future of Finance and Operations apps?”, and when I did, Dataverse was still called CDS and still went through several name changes. Has anything changed since I wrote that post? Do I still see Dataverse as the future of Finance and Operations apps? Well, now we know some things for sure, and new functionalities have been rolled out. Let me look at my crystal ball…
Moving data from the production to a sandbox environment is something we regularly have to do to have real updated data to do some testing or debugging. It’s a process that takes time and that can be automated as I explained in the post LCS DB API: automating Prod to Dev DB copies.
In this post, I’ll add an extra step to the database refresh: restore a data package (DP). Why? Because I’m sure we all need to change some parametrization or some endpoints in our test environments after a prod refresh.
You can learn more about the DMF REST API, which I’ll use, reading this post from Fabio Filardi: Dynamics 365 FinOps: Batch import automation with Azure Functions, Business Events and PowerBI.
You can learn more about the LCS DB REST API by reading these posts I wrote some time ago. You might want to read them because I’m skipping some steps which are already explained there:
