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  • Book Overview & Buying Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

By : Stefano Demiliani, Tacconi
4.9 (17)
Buy this Book
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Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

4.9 (17)
By: Stefano Demiliani, Tacconi
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

This book dives straight into guiding you through the process of building real-world solutions with the AL language and Visual Studio Code. It emphasizes best practices and extensibility patterns to ensure your extensions are well-structured, maintainable, and meet the needs of modern businesses. You'll learn advanced AL techniques, report creation methods, debugging strategies, and how to leverage telemetries for monitoring. Additionally, it covers performance optimization practices and API integration to help you create efficient and interconnected solutions. With a focus on extension development, this new edition allows you to jump right into coding without spending time on setup processes. This book introduces new chapters covering essential tasks that Business Central developers frequently encounter, such as file handling and printing management. Finally, the book expands its scope by including chapters on various integration aspects, including VS Code extensions, GitHub DevOps, Azure services, and Power Platform integrations. We’ll wrap up by covering Copilot capabilities in Business Central and how you can create your own generative AI copilots. By mastering these concepts and techniques, you'll be well-equipped to create powerful and customized solutions that extend the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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Who this book is for
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What this book covers
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To get the most out of this book
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Get in touch
1
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’s Online Momentum
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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’s Online Momentum
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Dynamics 365 Business Central’s evolution
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The Universal Code initiative
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The role of open source and social networks
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The future perspective
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Summary
Free Chapter
2
Mastering a Modern Development Environment
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Mastering a Modern Development Environment
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The Visual Studio Code user interface
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Visual Studio Code – the editing features
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Understanding the AL Language extension
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Understanding code analyzers
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GitHub Copilot for AL developers
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Summary
3
Extension Development Fundamentals
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Extension Development Fundamentals
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Technical requirements
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Basic concepts regarding extensions
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Understanding the basics of AL
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Understanding AL project structure best practices
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Naming guidelines and AL object ranges
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Working on AL coding guidelines
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Summary
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Developing a Customized Solution for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Developing a Customized Solution for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Translating a business case into a real-world extension
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Promoting actions
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Creating page views
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Installing and upgrading codeunits
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Defining permission sets in AL
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Summary
5
Writing Code for Extensibility
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Writing Code for Extensibility
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Why do we need extensible code?
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Business scenario
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Events and the “Handled” pattern
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Writing a dependent extension
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Interfaces in AL
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Extension’s code protection
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Summary
6
Advanced AL Development
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Advanced AL Development
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Understanding immutable keys
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Access modifiers in AL
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Handling errors with TryFunctions
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Using collectible errors
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Handling actions on errors
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Creating and extending role centers
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Handling XML and JSON files with the AL language
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Understanding Isolated Storage
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Working with control add-ins
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Notifications inside Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Understanding page background tasks
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Using Azure Key Vault in AL extensions
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Namespaces in AL language
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Summary
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Handling Files with Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Handling Files with Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Handling files with AL
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Using persistent blobs
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Isolated Storage
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Using Azure Blob Storage from AL
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Using Azure file shares from AL
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Summary
8
Report Development
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Report Development
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Anatomy of the report object
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The report extension object
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Tools to use for RDL, Word, and Excel layouts
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Report extension object: a basic example
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Cloning and refactoring reports
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Feature limitations when developing RDL or Word layout document reports
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Understanding report performance considerations
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Summary
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Printing
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Printing
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Understand cloud-ready printing
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Email printers
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Microsoft Universal Print printers
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Deep dive into the modern printing structure
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Alternatives to Microsoft Universal Print
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Summary
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Debugging
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Debugging
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Running in debug mode
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Visual Studio Code debugger sections
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Snapshot debugging
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Performance profiling
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Summary
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Telemetry
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Telemetry
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Signal fundamentals
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Enabling partner telemetry in Dynamics 365 Business Central online
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KQL log analysis
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Application Insights
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Tools to analyze telemetry data
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Power BI telemetry apps
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Custom signals
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Summary
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Coding for Performance
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Coding for Performance
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Defining an efficient data access layer
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Events and performance
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Running asynchronous patterns
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Testing and validating performances
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Summary
13
Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs
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Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs
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Using the OData protocol for APIs
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Configuring OAuth authentication for Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs
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Acquiring an authentication token from Microsoft Entra ID
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Using Dynamics 365 Business Central standard APIs
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Creating a custom API in Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Using OData bound actions
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Using OData unbound actions
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Using Dynamics 365 Business Central webhooks
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Summary
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Extending Dynamics 365 Business Central with Azure Services
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Extending Dynamics 365 Business Central with Azure Services
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Overview of Azure Functions
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Creating functions with Azure Functions
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Using Azure Functions from AL
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Overview of Azure Logic Apps
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Creating workflows with Azure Logic Apps
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Summary
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DevOps for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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DevOps for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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AL-Go for GitHub: an introduction
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Creating a new per-tenant extension with AL-Go for GitHub
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Branching strategies
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Git merge strategies
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Git in Visual Studio Code
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Handling the CI/CD pipeline
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Setting up your self-hosted GitHub runner
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Handling dependencies between applications
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Adding a test application to an existing project
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Registering a customer sandbox environment for continuous deployment
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Creating a release for your application
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Registering a customer Production environment for manual deployment
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Adding a performance test app to your repository
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Using AL-Go for GitHub for AppSource development
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Summary
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Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Platform Integration
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Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Platform Integration
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Technical requirements
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Power Automate and Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Creating a Power Apps app with Dynamics 365 Business Central integration
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Exposing Dynamics 365 Business Central data to Dataverse by using virtual tables
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Exposing Dynamics 365 Business Central events to Dataverse
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Summary
17
Useful and Proficient Tools for AL Developers
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Useful and Proficient Tools for AL Developers
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Who is Waldo?
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What tools to use
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Summary
18
Creating Generative AI Solutions for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Creating Generative AI Solutions for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Introduction to generative AI main concepts
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Introducing Azure OpenAI Service
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Dynamics 365 Business Central and Azure OpenAI Service
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Deploy an AI model with Azure OpenAI Service
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Creating a generative AI solution for Dynamics 365 Business Central
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Summary
19
Other Books You May Enjoy
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Other Books You May Enjoy
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Index
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Index

Preface

This book is an essential guide for developers that need to create advanced solutions with Dynamics 365 Business Central, the cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution provided by Microsoft.

We start by explaining the Dynamics 365 Business Central platform and its most recent developments, as well as anticipating its future development and how you can prepare for it. Our aim in this edition is to start coding an extension as soon as possible, so we will promptly move on to cover developer-oriented topics when coding your own Business Central extensions, covering the best coding practices for performant code.

In this edition, you’ll find new and improved coverage of some of the most common developer tasks in Business Central. In particular, you’ll find chapters on reporting, printing, and handling files from the cloud platform. After covering these tasks, you’ll learn how to perform debugging and telemetry for fully monitoring a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant. You’ll also learn how to apply DevOps principles to your development practice by using AL-Go for GitHub.

In this book we put a strong focus on integration, covering topics like APIs, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Dataverse, and Power Platform. Integrating with these technologies allows you to create custom applications connected to Dynamics 365 Business Central. In this edition we wanted to expand our coverage of Power Apps in particular, so we have added a detailed project with step-by-step instructions. You’ll learn how to create a fully functional app, complete with offline capabilities.

An exciting new topic in Microsoft is the integration of custom generative AI solutions in Dynamics 365 Business Central by using Azure OpenAI and the Copilot developer toolkit from AL. We’ll wrap up covering how you can configure the Copilot capabilities in Business Central, as well as how to create your own copilots.

Overall, we hope this book will help experienced developers learn the latest tools in the trade and best coding practices to become an expert at developing solutions for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

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