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In Dynamics 365

ISVLicenseGenerator v0.9: a farewell?

18 September, 2024 5 Mins Read

I’ve been working on the ISVLicenseGenerator open source tool for some years now, almost five. It all started when I ordered a code-signing certificate to sign ISV solutions, and I got a USB token instead of a software certificate.

After many years of Microsoft not offering support for these devices to sign the license files, it looks like with the changes introduced to AXUtil in the version 10.0.37, ISVLicenseGenerator will not be needed anymore…

If you want to learn more about ISVLicenseGenerator you can read:

In Dynamics 365

Error querying Synapse Link

19 March, 2024 3 Mins Read

A short one for today! I stumbled upon this while configuring the new Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse feature for an environment.

Most of the time, when I’m configuring resources on Azure, I do it as a subscription or resource group owner. This means I’m working in god-mode all the time, and I won’t be finding out some issues that users with less access rights do.

In Dynamics 365

I wrote a book! Extending Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Apps with Power Platform

15 January, 2024 4 Mins Read

I guess that most of my readers will already be aware of this, as I’ve been spamming LinkedIn with the news: I wrote a book!

The book is called like this post’s title: “Extending Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Apps with Power Platform”. It covers some practical scenarios where I show how to use Power Apps, Power Automate or AI Builder with F&O data.

It also offers an introduction and overview into the Power Platform integration and F&O: linked environments, Dual-write, Virtual tables, Dataverse, PPAC, etc.

In Azure

Microsoft Sentinel for Dynamics 365 F&O

19 July, 2023 10 Mins Read

Today I’m bringing you a post that’s all about Dynamics 365 F&O, but the main focus is on security, specifically Microsoft Sentinel. Some days ago it was announced a Microsoft Sentinel Solution for F&O had been published and is currently in preview. Let’s learn a bit about it!

Sometimes we overlook the security aspects of the things that are not directly related to F&O, specially regarding resources like networking, storage accounts, dev VMs, Microsoft Entra ID (this is Azure AD’s new name!) or using Bastion.

And we don’t do that because we just don’t care about security, but because we’re Dynamics 365 people, and sometimes we might lack the knowledge in other things. If you’re lucky, you’ll have an in-house security team that’ll take care of that, otherwise we need to train ourselves a bit.

This is the first time I’ve used Microsoft Sentinel, and I’m for sure missing on a lot of things and features. Time to learn!

In Dynamics 365

F&O alert emails in Power Automate

10 July, 2023 7 Mins Read

There’s a nice feature in Dynamics 365 F&O that lets us emit notifications when data is changed, created or deleted: the alert framework.

In this post, I will show you how to send the alerts as Business events and send emails notifying the users using a Power Automate flow.

When I was almost done writing this blog post, I found this blog post and video from Scott Gaines where he showed this scenario. Take a look at it for a clearer step-by-step guide: Using Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Alerts to Trigger Power Automate Flows.

In Dynamics 365

ISV License Generator v0.6 released

16 March, 2023 2 Mins Read

Yesterday I released a new version of ISV License Generator with full support for the SHA-256 hash function after fixing an issue with it.

What’s new in ISV License Generator?

In this new version the support to generate Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations licenses using the SHA-1 hash has been removed, and it will use SHA-256 by default as the AXUtil tool does.

In Dynamics 365

2023 Release Wave 1 plans: what’s new?

25 January, 2023 5 Mins Read

It’s already that time of the year again, the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1 plans have just been released!

The 2023 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations is focused on improving the development, administration, and user experiences by removing barriers, tightening integrations, and enhancing cross-platform capabilities. This release will bring a range of new features and capabilities that will help improve the performance of the platform and enhance the overall experience for developers, administrators, and end-users.

The features described here are planned to be delivered from April to September 2023.

In Azure

Configure Azure Bastion for Dynamics 365 F&O VMs

17 January, 2023 8 Mins Read

We’ve been working with the F&O development VMs for a long time, specially Microsoft partners that need to be able to quickly and easily change between different customer environments, and using the VHD is a bit more complicated in that scenario.

And of course, we use Remote Desktop Protocol to connect to these VMs. RDP is insecure due to its weak encryption, widespread use, and the lack of security features built-in to the protocol. So hackers often target RDP to gain unauthorized access to systems. You can learn more about securing your VMs in Best practices for defending Azure Virtual Machines.

Today, we will walk through the steps of configuring Azure Bastion for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations development VMs.

In Dynamics 365

Priority-based batch scheduling in Dynamics 365

29 July, 2022 4 Mins Read

We’ve seen a lot of improvements to the product since it was released as AX7, and some name changes too 😝 And one of the areas where we’ve seen more enhancements is the batch framework.

And since the currently live last version of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, 10.0.28, we have a new feature that will be enabled by default for all new instances, and it will be enabled for all existing instances in 10.0.29: the priority-based batch scheduling.

In Azure

Logs in Dynamics 365: not anymore!

30 June, 2022 5 Mins Read

Let’s talk about logs in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. And I don’t mean the built-in database logs we’ve had since the old Axapta days. I’m talking about plain logs, a table and a form to see how/why data is changing, or logging external calls to OData or custom web services endpoints in the ERP.

It’s something that I’m sure almost all developers at some point have had to do. The customer wants to record CRUD events, you suggest enabling the DB log, but the customer wants a new form to see the data. Or maybe you’re monitoring all the calls to your custom web services.