---
title: What are unified developer environments?
description: "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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorisdg/) showed us the first sneak peek of a local…"
url: "https://ariste.info/dynamics365almguide/what-are-unified-developer-environments/"
updated: "2024-12-29"
category: Unified experience ALM / Unified development environment
---

# What are unified developer environments?

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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorisdg/) 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](http://ariste.info/2019/06/microsoft-business-applications-summit-2019/). **It's local, but it's also not local**.

Why? That's because the [unified developer experience](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/developer/unified-experience/finance-operations-dev-overview) 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](http://ariste.info/dynamics365almguide/deploy-unified-developer-environment-powershell/) or [from the PPAC UI](http://ariste.info/dynamics365almguide/deploy-ude-environment-ppac/).

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