Day: February 26, 2024

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 3rd of the new functionality in the Development section is remove friction when working with external app dependencies.

For resellers who develop per-tenant extensions for customers, or for publishers who create AppSource apps, it isn’t uncommon for them to build on the work by other publishers, and thereby take a dependency on these. However, in order to develop or test, they need access to the AppSource apps they depend on.

Today, this involves a tedious manual process where resellers and publishers with dependencies must contact publishers owning the applications they depend on and ask for symbols to develop against or runtime packages to test with. This is not only required once, but continuously as new versions of the Business Central first-party applications and the publishers’ applications versions emerge, making the whole process tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.

In this version Microsoft plan to unblock developing and compiling against external applications in containers and test in online sandboxes.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2024
General Availability: Apr 2024

Feature Details

In this release Microsoft plan to allow resellers and publishers to download symbols for AppSource applications to use these to develop against on-premises and in containers. In addition, Microsoft also plan to provide GitHub actions to make it easy to provision online sandboxes with the required applications installed to run tests on.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 2nd of the new functionality in the Development section is debug the system application.

Have you missed being able to debug into the System application? Many have, and with the recent introduction of the SecureText data type, Microsoft will enable debugging of the System application, benefiting both development and troubleshooting of applications, as well as Open Source contributions to the System application itself.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2024
General Availability: Apr 2024

Feature Details

With this, you’ll be able to step into the System application code base when debugging to understand code flow and inspect variables, unless these are protected by the new SecureText type.

Having access to debug the System application helps both during development and troubleshooting of AppSource and customer-specific applications, as well as with contributing to the System application itself via https://github.com/microsoft/ALAppExtensions.

I’ve been doing some work implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with a client recently and, while they were doing some UAT, they came across an “issue” whereby some fully invoiced purchase orders were remaining in the open purchase orders list.

The client was a little confused that only some of the POs were remaining open while others were being archived. The reason is that there is two different processes for invoicing purchase orders and one of these processes automatically moves the PO to the archive and the other leaves them open.

The first, which automatically archives the PO, is when the invoice is created directly from the Purchase Order page.

The second, where the PO remains open, is when an invoice is created in the Purchase Invoice. When invoices are created this way, the PO remains open and a function needs to be run to do the archiving.

This function will, depending on the archiving options, either delete or move the purchase order to the archive. This function is the Delete Invoiced Purchase Orders one:

You can choose to filter the POs which will be deleted and either schedule it to run to at a later date and time, perhaps out of normal working hours, or immediately.

If all PO invoicing is done on a 1-2-1 basis from the Purchase Order page this routine doesn’t need to be run, but if any invoicing is done on the Purchase Invoice page then the delete function will need to be run periodically. This is something which would often be part of the month end process..