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In Azure DevOps

New Azure DevOps release tasks: MSAL authentication and ADAL deprecation

25 November, 2021 3 Mins Read

There’s a new version and a new task for our release pipelines that use the Azure-hosted agents. These changes have been introduced recently to support the new MSAL authentication libraries for the LCS service connection used to upload and deploy the deployable packages.

The current service connections use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Authentication Library (ADAL), and support for ADAL will end in June 2022.

This means that if we don’t update the Asset Upload and Asset Deployment to their new versions (1.* and 2.* respectively) the release pipelines could stop working after 30th June 2022.

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 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 Azure DevOps

Add and build .NET projects to your Dynamics 365 pipeline

1 October, 2020 5 Mins Read

I bet that most of us have had to develop some .NET class library to solve something in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. You create a C# project, build it, and add the DLL as a reference in your FnO project. Don’t do that anymore! You can add the .NET project to source control, build it in your pipeline, and the DLL gets added to the deployable package!

I’ve been trying this during the last days after a conversation on Yammer, and while I’ve managed to build .NET and X++ code in the same pipeline, I’ve found some issues or limitations.

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

Secure your Azure Pipelines with Azure Key Vault

11 February, 2020 4 Mins Read

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

After the update of my last post about calling the LCS API from Azure DevOps Pipelines I thought that creating a pipeline with a password in plain sight was not very secure. How could we add extra security to a pipeline? Once again we can turn to an Azure tool to help us, the Azure Key Vault.

Azure Key Vault

A Key Vault is a service that allows us to safely store certificates or secrets and later use them in our applications and services. And like many other Azure services it has a cost but it’s really low and, for a normal use, you will be billed like a cent or none a month. Don’t be stingy with security!