During the past week I attended the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS). It was my first time in an event like this and the experience has been wonderful and intense (and tiring). The event took place from Sunday to Tuesday and traveling from Madrid to Atlanta and back, including a 5 hour delay in Toronto and a 6 hour layover in Newark, in just 5 days was exhausting.
The event’s organization has been really really good, with lots of sessions from the product teams who would answer all the attendants’ questions. The only bad thing has been the overlapping of sessions and not being able to see all of them in person. Hopefully all sessions have been recorded and are already available online.
Another good thing of the MBAS is that there’s more than #MSDyn365FO, it’s all of Microsoft’s business apps in the same place and you can learn some things that are out of your area. In my case it was a workshop about the new AI Builder for PowerApps. Microsoft is really investing a lot of efforts into the PowerApps, Flow and CDS and I think it’s a good idea that us, FnO folks, should start using all of them in our projects because that’s where the product is heading. If I’m lucky enough to attend the MBAS next year in Anaheim, I think I’ll try to go to as many workshops as possible and see if some ideas to integrate new things into MSDyn365FO come to me.
Some interesting sessions for technical people were:
- Updated developer experience: Joris de Gruyter showed to the #XppGroupies the new developer tools coming in preview in October (HYPE HYPE HYPE!!!). This one was short but intense, and another step in becoming real software developers (my opinion).
- Implementation Best Practices for Dynamics 365: Performance best practices for a successful Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations implementation: this is a must for developers, performance guidelines, excellent content.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations: X++ programming with quality: this one wasn’t recorded, or at least it’s not been uploaded yet. New features for developers like App Checker (the replacement of BPs), App Tracker (Azure Application Insights in our code), SysDa and ATL.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations: Strategic Lifecycle Services Investments: the new self-service environments are coming. Cloud environments on Service Fabric, zero downtime updates and faster environment deployments.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations: Business Events framework: great session with a demo showing a real life ideas to use the Business Events framework.
There’s a lot more stuff about CDS, PSA, RSAT and other things and products. Just go and check the sessions.
