But if you don’t like PowerShell, now you can deploy a unified developer environment from PPAC’s UI! It’s a bit more of work but very easy.
The first step is going to PPAC, Manage, and in the Environments tab create a new one:
In the dialog, complete the name field and make sure the “Add a Dataverse data store?” check is selected:
Click Next, and in the next dialog make sure to enable the “Enable Dynamics 365 apps?” checkbox:
Remember what I said about the DomainName parameter in the script section? Here you can also define it if you want.
Finally, click the Save button and wait until the environment is ready, it shouldn’t take long.
When the operation finishes, we have a Dataverse environment ready, but F&O is not there yet. When it’s ready, open its details screen and select Dynamics 365 apps in resources on the top menu or the lower right menu:
Now click the Install app button and look for the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Platform Tools app. Click next and install it. This will take a bit longer than deploying the DV environment, but not long, around 5 to 10 minutes.
Once that’s done we need to install another app, the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Provisioning App which is what will install F&O in this Dataverse environment!
Select it, click next and you will be taken to a new page:
And here’s where the magic happens! In this screen we must select the Enable Developer Tools for Finance and Operations and Enable Demo Data for Finance and Operations checkboxes. The second one is optional and will install the Contoso demo data.
Finally, select which version you want to install from the dropdown:
This dropdown usually shows the newest PQU of each of the last supported versions. If you want to select a different version… well, that’s something we all want to know how and if it’ll be possible 🙂
Finally, click the Install button and wait around 1h and 30m. When it finishes, your unified development environment will be ready to be used and you can connect it to Visual Studio.
