Adrià Ariste Santacreu - ariste.info

In Azure DevOps

Update VMs using pipelines and d365fo.tools

8 November, 2021 6 Mins Read

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!

In X++

Package and Model planning

3 November, 2021 4 Mins Read

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.

In X++

PriceDisc: getting prices the right way

19 October, 2021 1 Min Read

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…

In Dataverse

Dataverse and Cross-apps capabilities: the future of FnO

13 October, 2021 4 Mins Read

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…

In Azure

Restore a data package with Azure DevOps Pipelines

1 September, 2021 8 Mins Read

You can read my complete ALM guide on Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations and Azure DevOps.

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:

In Dataverse

Dual-write table mappings: copy to other environments

27 July, 2021 5 Mins Read

In a past post, we learned how to create custom data entities to be used in Dual-write.

And now you might be asking yourself, how do I move the Dual-write table mappings to a test or production environment from the development environment? Do I need to repeat everything I’ve done on the dev machine in a Sandbox environment?

Fortunately, we don’t need to do it all manually again, we can use a Dataverse solution to copy the Dual-write table mappings between environments.

If you want to learn more about Dual-write you can:

In X++

SocrateX & Application checker

2 June, 2021 9 Mins Read

It’s been a while since I first wrote about the Application Checker in 2019, and here I am again. In this blog post, I’ll talk about SocrateX and XQuery too, and I’ll also show how to generate the files and databases used to analyze the code.

If you want to know more about App Checker or SocrateX, you can read these resources in addition to the post I’ve linked above:

In Dataverse

Develop custom Data Entities for Dual-write

29 March, 2021 6 Mins Read

Dual-write has been around for almost two years now. It’s one of the ways of integrating Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Dataverse along with Virtual Entities.

The standard solution comes with many out-of-the-box entities available to synchronize. This has been one of the great improvements since Dual-write was made available in preview, when Juanan and I demoed it in the 2019 Dynamics Saturday in Madrid.

But what if we need to develop a new custom Data Entity in MSDyn365FO and use it in Dual-write? It’s easy but there’s some things we need to remember when doing it.

In Azure

Azure DevTest Labs powered builds for Dynamics 365 FnO

1 February, 2021 20 Mins Read

The end of Tier-1 Microsoft-managed build VMs is near, and this will leave us without the capacity to synchronize the DB or run tests in a pipeline, unless we deploy a new build VM in our, or our customer’s, Azure subscription. Of course, there might be a cost concern with it, and there’s where Azure DevTest Labs can help us!

This post has been written thanks to Joris de Gruyter‘s session in the past DynamicsCon: Azure Devops Automation for Finance and Operations Like You’ve Never Seen! And there’s also been some investigation and (a lot of) trial-and-error from my side until everything has been working.

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.

In Azure

Tier 1 Microsoft managed VMs will be removed

10 October, 2020 4 Mins Read

If you receive the LCS email notifications for your projects you already know this: all Tier 1 virtual machines from Microsoft’s subscription will be gone as early as 1 December! This is what the emails say: As communicated previously, Microsoft is removing the use of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to access environments managed by Microsoft. As RDP access is required for development, going forward customers will be required to develop using a Cloud Hosted Environment or…