If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you maybe recall having seen a post about a session at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit in 2019 where Joris de Gruyter showed us the first sneak peek of a local development tool.
This was in 2019 and the #XppGroupies were really hyped about this. Being able to develop on our laptops instead of a CHE or the VHD!
Fast-forward to the end of 2023, and after some challenges and changes we finally got a preview of local development. But it didn’t look like what we saw in the MBAS. It’s local, but it’s also not local.
Why? That’s because the unified developer experience relies on Dataverse environments with F&O where we deploy our code. We can do local development, we have the AOT in Visual Studio in our local PCs, but we need a Dataverse environment to deploy our code before we can test or debug it.
We’ll see more details in the next sections.
What do I need? #
The first thing you need is a license:
- Finance
- Supply Chain Management
- Project Operations (including a partner sandbox)
- Commerce (only for trials)
Any of these will allow you to deploy or provision a Dataverse environment with the corresponding F&O template, where you can install the dev tools.
This step is needed to deploy a unified developer environment, if your user has no license assigned the next steps will fail.
Then you also need admin access to Power Platform admin center (PPAC), either as a global admin or Dynamics 365 admin. And of course, you need to at least have 1GB of available Dataverse capacity.
To deploy a unified developer environment (UDE) we need to create a Dataverse environment with a Dataverse data store (a database).
We can do this in two ways: from the command-line using PowerShell or from the PPAC UI.
