If you migrate from Dynamics NAV On-Prem to Business Central Cloud you’ll learn that assigning and migrating users is a little bit different than it used to be. You’ll have to assign users from your Office 365 environment and then assign permissions in Business Central. What if you have 180 users and you had spent a lot of time in NAV to create roles that are approved and compliant. You can create the Permission Sets with PowerShell if you upgrade via version 18, but if you migrate using the cloud migration tool from the BC14 version this does not exist. Also, you’ll find out that objects no l ..read more

Let’s continue where we left off in my previous post about Job Inventory. In that post, I’ve tried to explain that when you purchase something for a specific Job in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central the inventory is always corrected to zero unless you post your transaction via the Item Journal. In the last few major releases Microsoft made a lot of improvements to the integration with the Job Module and the rest of Business Central. Let’s review two of these improvements and then explain the “problem” that these improvements have created and (spoiler alert) how to fix this problem. Impro ..read more

Last week I promised to blog about something less nerdy, something functional. Let’s see if I can keep that promise. Since September last year I’ve had the honour of working on an upgrade project as functional/strategic consultant. The customer is upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 to Business Central running in the cloud. The NAV 2017 system is customized and there is an ISV solution that does not exist in AppSource. The goal of the project is to migrate to Business Central with no customizations, only running with apps from AppSource. From a business perspective, Jobs are the center ..read more

You have probably heard of the Women in Dynamics initiative that launched last year at Directions EMEA. Roughly a year ago and roughly around the same time I started my transition. When my brother and I were driving to BCTechDays together last Thursday I was wondering in my head if they would be represented at this event too. After we arrived at the event and watched the crowd I quickly realized that this must not be the case. This is a male-only event with hamburgers and beer. You could smell the testosterone going around. My guess would be that less than 5 percent of the attendees was female ..read more

This is a continued blog from the one I wrote earlier today about Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) causing locks on SQL Server. In this blog I will show what happens on SQL Server if you keep result sets open during long transactions and we will discuss a possible workaround that I need your feedback on. How to reproduce this? Together with the project team we’ve reproduced this issue on the latest versions of Business Central, also with a relatively small database. The examples shown in this blog are from a Business Central 14 system running on a SQL Azure database scaled as General Pu ..read more

It has been a while since my last blog. I’ve been a little pre-occupied by my personal situation. But, the good news is that work continues as usual and it remains interesting enough to share experiences from. This blog post is about the performance of Business Central on SQL Server. It seems that this subject continues to be connected to me. I tried for a while to shake it off but decided to just give up and let the interesting projects happen. This for sure is an interesting project. The problem that I am going to describe in this blog can happen to anyone, and it probably does, but only in ..read more

Initially you will most likely use KQL for ad-hoc analysis if a customer calls you in panic that a system is slow. But it is much better to use the telemetry to prevent issues and predict that systems get slower and fix issues before users get their eyes all wet. For this it is important to be able to do comparisons, and in most businesses you can compare business days (monday vs. tuesday) or weekdays (this monday vs. last monday) or hours (10am vs. 4pm). This morning I logged in to a customers system and compared the last 4 weeks per hour. You can immediately see that the system is not used ..read more

Time flies if you are having fun. It seems like yesterday that Luc van Vugt had published his first book about Automated Testing and recently the Second Edition has been released. Everyone in our community knows, or should know, that having the Automated Testing book from Luc is mandatory. Luc is the authority when it comes to this subject. But the question is, why should you buy this second edition? Well, because a lot has changed since the first version. And this book is twice as thick! Why has so much changed? Testing as such has not, so why is this book so much thicker and better than the ..read more

Time to get back to Best Practices for Per Tenant Extensions. This time we are going to discuss something that in my opinion should also be implemented by ISV’s in their AppSource solutions. By default, AL Objects are extensible. This means that everyone can take a dependency on your extension and therefor Microsoft does not allow you to refactor any code once it lands on AppSource. The solution is simple, but since it’s manual it requires extra discipline. My recomendation would be to, by default, make all tables, pages and codeunits extensible = false and access = internal. This means others ..read more

The alternative title for this blog post would have been something like… TempBlob, why did you waste my time! Or waste thousands of hours accross our community. The topics of my blogs tend to be about what happens in the freelance projects I work on, and last week this was two extensions that have a substantial size (1000+ objects) that had to be BC19 Compatible. BC19 is the first version of Business Central where warnings about obsoleted objects became errors. The most commonly used are TempBlob and Language. Language Language is easy. Functions that used to exist in the table moved to a code ..read more