New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1: Optimized Runtime Package Generation For Sharing

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1.

The fourth of the new functionality in the Development section is Optimized Runtime Package Generation For Sharing.

Whenever partners want to consume AppSource apps as part of local development, or continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, they need to contact app owners to request runtime packages. This is a manual and time-consuming process both for publishers and resellers and includes additional work for publishers to generate appropriate runtime package versions. Given the increase of both AppSource app customers and amount of AppSource apps per customer, optimizing runtime package generation and distribution is important in reducing partner overhead and scale resources efficiently.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Mar 2023
General Availability: Apr 2023

Feature Details

While requested, this feature does not introduce a new runtime package cloud service for partners to manage and share runtime libraries. Instead, it focuses on defining a standardized format for sharing runtime packages by providing the ability to generate runtime packages with alc.exe instead of an NST. Using alc.exe reduces complexity and improves performance and it adds CI/CD scripts both for publishers to generate runtime packages on demand and for resellers to request and download these on demand. These tools increase efficiency and reduce manual work. Taking this approach also allows publishers to distribute apps for on-premises, aligning support resellers both for on-premises and cloud development.