04 Nov Technical News – Business Central 2019
As usual, on the way back of the Directions EMEA congress, I write an entry for the blog, where I summarize the main technical developments.
Most sessions focused on news from the “BC 2019 Wave 2 “version, which was launched a few days before the event. I will not go into functional news that you can consult in other blog entries. You can also consult directly the official list of news published by Microsoft in this link (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2019wave2).
Partners or end users of Business Central can influence the future of the product . So much so that most of the novelties presented have turned out to be suggestions of these proposals. Thus, we encourage this list of proposals to be reviewed regularly and that any news we believe may be interesting be published. You can directly access the web of ideas and suggestions here (https://experience.dynamics.com/ideas/categories/?forum=e288ef32-8). Without further ado, we enter the most technical part of the article.
The main conclusion is that, there are no new strong changes at the programming level as in previous years: events, extensions, AL, extensions V2. This means, as it was said in more than one session that at last “the sun is rising in the cloud”. And the first headline to record in our day to day is that we have to forget the C / AL language and the Windows client, to think only of AL and web client.
I would like to go into more detail in the following aspects, which have to start being part of our usual vocabulary:
New architecture (System Application and breacking changes):
Microsoft wants to separate the small features of the base application as much as possible, dividing it into small modules or “ System Applications” (you can access here https://github.com/Microsoft/ALAppExtensions to see more details about the division).
This change entails a reengineering that, sometimes, can break our current extensions. To do this, any function that is affected by these changes will become obsolete within a 1 year margin. Microsoft is committed to informing about the change and the proposed solution, so that we can adapt to the new structure.
Telemetry:
Working with the systems in the cloud allows to carry out a series of follow-ups in the use of the tool to be able to get into the detail of any of them. For example, we can review behaviors of our clients / extensions as important as understand processes and usage flow, detect performance problems, track errors, etc.
To activate it, it must be done from the tenants administrator console. Of course, when activating it it is very important to ensure that there are no users working, since the instance is restarted. Once activated, queries can be made using an SQL type language, named KQL (Kusto Query Language).
SystemID key:
Now all records will be identified by a GUID code, which will be your immutable key . These can be collected with a GetBySystemID (SalesHeader.GetBySystemID (MyID), SalesHeader.SetRange (SystemId, MyID)) statement. This functionality is expected to replace the “Integration Records” table shortly, so if we use this table in one of our extensions, we will soon have breacking change in sight.
The list of terms and technical news is much more extensive, but these points serve as a guide to start addressing these changes in our companies. We will continue to report how we apply these changes in Triangle!
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