I’ve been working with Business Central Telemetry a lot the last coulple of months, having to deal with deadlocks and such. And while doing so, quite some new ideas came to mind that I’d like to investigate by means of Telemetry. But first, a disclaimer I’m absolutly not an expert. Probably there are better ways for everything I’m doing, and please, let me know if there are! I’m a fan of scripting, I’m a fan of fast running queries giving me fast results .. and since a few months, that made me fans of reading, using and learning from the KQL samples on Microsoft github as well. SetLoadFields ..read more

Just a small heads-up that made us scratch our heads for a while.. . In the new version of Business Central (2023 Release Wave 1 – aka v22), the PowerShell CmdLet “Get-NAVAppInfo” now gives one more dependency in the “dependencies” collection. Or as pictures say more than a thousand words: V21 and below: But from V22, we also get Microsoft’s “Application” dependency in that overview: It made some of our pipelines fail, as we were looping dependencies, finding apps and such – and obviously, it couldn’t find the “Application” app for the purpose we needed . Well, it makes sense it reports this ..read more

It’s always nice having to prep a webinar about “what’s new in Business Central”. It makes you being very busy with what’s next, and forces you to dive into it :-). Not always easy though, because – even today – there isn’t too much documentation online yet (it’s not fully released either, so .. quite obvious). So, while prepping this, I did take some notes, which I’d be happy to share with you. Just a complete overview of everything that I found, with for some topics, my own train of thoughts.  Interesting?  May be .. I’m just happy to share ;-). So let’s go over the list of new fea ..read more

A short heads-up! Time is running out, and if you want to be part of it, you’ll have to act fast! Days of Knowledge 2023 is a series of conferences organized by DirectionsEMEA (aka “Directions4Partners“). The conferences are focused on education, sharing knowledge and “upgrading” Business Central professionals across the industry. Each event consists of 2 conference days packed with sessions, and 1 pre-conference training day. There are three events in different locations, so you can choose the one that suits you best: Birmingham, UK (March 23 – 24) Düsseldorf, Gemany (May 25 – 26) Odense, D ..read more

Not too long ago, Stephano shared a concern regarding “TryFunctions”. It’s a must read, and you can find it here: Dynamics 365 Business Central and TryFunctions: be careful! – Stefano Demiliani. I think it’s important to warn people about things that act different than people might think – so let me take this opportunity to put yet another thing on the table. DataTransfer Since Business Central v21, a new feature has been introduced: the DataTransfer type, which enables for fast moving of data between fields or tables with an insane performance gain over whatever we were able to do before we h ..read more

So, I was reminded recently during a twitter thread about an issue we had been having that we investigated quite thoroughly to figure out what was going on. The issue We always try to upgrade all customers to latest release – and we encountered some delays in API communications, which seemed to got worse at every new upgrade. At some point, every API call took from 500 to 1000 milliseconds. I think we all agree that this is FAR to high. Even for a simple call, like getting the companies, it took so long. Investigation We really didn’t have any clue why this happened, so we started to list all ..read more

Not too long ago, we had an upgrade issue at a customer: the upgrade timed out, and after investigation, it was simply because our upgrade code: it took too long to modify 130000 records (well – and quite some validations, I admit, but still – it’s not that much, is it?). This made me hold on to some things that I had been doing even for my own apps (like the waldo.BCPerftool (which I’m now reminded again that I still need to blog about that )). But before I go into that, let’s start from the beginning … The issue The context of the issue is simple: when you have too much data that you need to ..read more

One of the things that totally slipped by me, is the new app from Microsoft that apparently was released in the last wave called “Data Search“. It’s a simple, but powerful concept: Search for “any” record in your data. Well, any record that you have set up to search for at least ;-). It is explained here: Search for Specific Data – Business Central | Microsoft Learn Yeah, I know, it’s not a lot of explanation – but then again, it doesn’t need much explanation, does it? There is a search-string, and it will search for that string in the tables that you have set up (for that role). In fact, in ..read more

Yesterday, I got a question that I found was too difficult to answer: “What tables were added in 20.5?” The reason for this question was simple: we need to update the manually created permissionsets in order for new tables to be supported after an upgrade. So – what tables were added? There are a number of ways to deal with this, like exporting the AllObj-table from both versions, and do some kind of VLOOKUP in excel. I didn’t want to spend those 10 minutes to do that. I wanted to spend a few hours in creating a PowerShell script . And here is the result: $Sourcebranch = 'be-19' $Targetbranch ..read more

Here’s a small blogpost about an undocumented, but not uninteresting “feature” (at least not in my book ;-)). Performance Profiling You’re probably very much aware of the Performance Profiler in Business Central: an ability to monitor code execution in terms of “durations” and “hit count”, and having a view on how the code/process performed. As a first version, we had in v19 the AL Performance Profiler where we could profile from VSCode, and analyze the result in VSCode as well. Awesome tool, which looks something like this: You can find more information here: AL Profiler Overview – Business ..read more