Sometimes, “best practices” turn into “bad practices”.  And recently, with one of the best new features of Business Central that just fell in our laps (most users probably won’t realize), one good practice became not just unnecessary .. but even a bad practice. When I asked CentralQ.  I got a lot of truth, but also (what I believe) misinterpreted stuff.  So – lets write a post, and see if CentralQ picks it up . As said, this is all about the new “Tri-State Locking” feature, which was already quite well explained on the blog of Mads Gram here: Tri-state locking – BC Internals, bu ..read more

I don’t know about you – but when working with Telemetry, I found it sometimes tedious to map certain traces to actual customers (names of the company, that is).  Here’s a small post on how I handle it today. We (our company – we are a partner of a multitude of Business Central customers) have one endpoint that collects all traces from all customers.  I know some partners have an endpoint per customer – but this setup actually works really well for us, as it’s so easy to compare one customer with another. Now, the only real field in Telemetry that identifies a customer, is the “aadTe ..read more

Microsoft just released the plans for the next major release wave.  I’m not going to explain what they mean with “waves” anymore – I did that in length in one of my previous posts (Microsoft Dynamics 365 2023 Release Wave 2 plan for Business Central (waldo.be)).  Spoiler: not a fan! I have a hunch that the content that I will be sharing is not going to be 100% complete.  Two reasons for this hunch: first of all, it usually never is.  And second, you’ll see it’s still just quite a limited list.  It feels like some stuff is still missing. This is also why I always share ..read more

Here’s a Christmas present from me for you: a short, but may be fore some people a very liberating post on how to speed up your tests in your pipeline, without doing anything “real” ;-). The problem We have made “tests” mandatory in our company.  What that means: every single pullrequest is being code reviewed, and in the code review, we check for either a changed or new tests.  That has lead to quite a number of tests: 8500 for the product, and we even have a customer with (in the meantime) over 1500 tests. Over the years, we noticed a growing performance problem when running tests ..read more

I recently had a very scary thing happening on our Telemetry setup, that I would have never expected, and was glad I was able to catch it in time. TL;DR Any extra action on your Business Central environment can cause an explosion of telemetry signals, which possibly turns into an insane Azure bill.  Therefore, it’s important to monitor and analyze your Telemetry usage, so you can take action before it’s too late. A story … Not too long ago, we were analyzing our costs of Telemetry.  We have about 40 customers on Telemetry, and we were paying about 1000 EUR per month for having this d ..read more

Directions EMEA 2023 is just around the corner, and I’m looking very much forward to it!  And so should you! ;-). Since last year in Hamburg – which was clearly the best edition of all – they have set high expectations.  At least for me ;-).  It was the first edition to have “deep dive” sessions, which they will pursue this year as well – and the venue .. oh boy .. the venue was just perfect. This year: Lyon.  Never been there .. and probably never would have if it wasn’t for this convention, so may be this is a good opportunity for me ;-). When you look at the schedule, y ..read more

Not too long ago, I was (and still am) challenged with analyzing deadlocks at a specific customer.  And in all honesty – that was not easy, because, you know, deadlocks is something on SQL – and it’s not like we have a lot of access to SQL tools. What are deadlocks? I’m not going to lie – I can’t explain it better than Wikipedia does : In concurrent computing, deadlock is any situation in which no member of some group of entities can proceed because each waits for another member, including itself, to take action, such as sending a message or, more commonly, releasing a lock. Deadlocks a ..read more

It’s that time again: the plan for the next wave is there!  Erik Hougaard already covered the plan – and in good habit – I’ll do the same in blog-form (I still hate making videos – or getting content from watching them – I’m clearly getting too old ;-)). I’ll do as I always do: focus on what I’m interested in – give my own perspective – and basically ignore the stuff I don’t have anything decent to say about (so, likely, most things will be ignored ).  In any case, I’ll create links to all of the articles, so you have a nice overview.  Is that useful?  May be not – but it h ..read more

BCTechDays is over, and it’s time for an (almost) traditional BCTechDays aftermath :-). A short one this time .. What an edition is was again . Too bad I simply had to spend all the time I could find to prep for my own session with Vjeko. But more on that later. This year, it was the first edition (that I can remember) in June. This meant: summertime! And man, have we known. I have only seen bright skies (for the limited time outside) and hot temperature – and this also meant: sweaty workshop rooms . As far as I know, the reason why BCTechDays has moved to June is because of Microsoft – and p ..read more

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