Dynamics Business Central / NAV Development Developer Digest - Vol. 421
ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. In this week’s Developer Digest vol. 421: Waldo shares his frustration moving DLLs causing a breaking change, advice on changing the BC license used by Docker, and a discussion on setting up BC SaaS development and testing environments.
The Dynamics NAV and Business Central community, including the ArcherPoint technical staff, comprises developers, project managers, and consultants who are constantly communicating with the common goal of sharing helpful information to help customers be more successful.
As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them on blogs, forums, and social media…for everyone’s benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this community—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share the wealth of information with everyone who might not have the time to check out the multitude of resources out there?
Thus, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV/BC Developer Digest was born. We present a collection of thoughts and findings from Dynamics NAV/BC experts and devotees worldwide each week. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.
Moving DLL Causing Breaking Change
Waldo shares his frustration on Twitter because moving his dynamic link libraries to a new subfolder has caused a breaking change in D365 Business Central. To add to the frustration, it’s not backward compatible.
Developer Tip of the Day: BC Licenses and Docker
Kyle is at it again, making life easier for developers. In this Developer Tip of the Day, he shares this.
Developer Tip of the Day: BC Licenses and Docker
You can change the BC license being used by a Docker container with these PowerShell commands:
Import-NAVServerLicense `
-LicenseFile “c:\temp\BC.flf” `
-ServerInstance $instance `
-Database NavDatabase
Restart-NAVServerInstance -ServerInstance $instance
BC SaaS Development and Testing
Kyle poses a poll to the developer crew: “When working on a SaaS customer, do you use a local Docker container or a SaaS sandbox for development? And where do you have the customer do their testing?”
Tom says: “I typically use a cloud sandbox for development, and they have another cloud sandbox for testing. It’s kind of like the dev/test/production old days of the legacy client.
“I think this is the better way to go because the SaaS sandbox lets you use the customer’s dataset instead of the Cronus dataset and because you don’t have to maintain the local container.”
Matt suggests: “For me it depends on the scope of the change. Small things, I go with a container. Big changes, a sandbox with client data.”
Chris offers: “If they are using an app from the Marketplace, it usually has to be a sandbox.
“I’ve seen at least one customer where I don’t have permissions to load extensions into the sandbox…needs to be a container at that point.”
Michael agrees with all of the responses above.
Matt adds: “Just remember, because this has become an issue lately, the customer has limited sandboxes for you to develop in. 40% of our customers that have development going on have more than one developer assigned to them. 20% have more than two. “If you are using a sandbox when you don’t have to, it’s on you to ensure that you don’t become a blocker for other developers. Don’t forget to clean up after yourselves and budget for extra time to coordinate if you’re doing this.”
Interested in Dynamics NAV and Business Central development? Be sure to see our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.
Read “How To” blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.