Preface
This book is an essential guide for developers that need to create advanced solutions with Dynamics 365 Business Central, the cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution provided by Microsoft.
We start by explaining the Dynamics 365 Business Central platform and its most recent developments, as well as anticipating its future development and how you can prepare for it. Our aim in this edition is to start coding an extension as soon as possible, so we will promptly move on to cover developer-oriented topics when coding your own Business Central extensions, covering the best coding practices for performant code.
In this edition, you’ll find new and improved coverage of some of the most common developer tasks in Business Central. In particular, you’ll find chapters on reporting, printing, and handling files from the cloud platform. After covering these tasks, you’ll learn how to perform debugging and telemetry for fully monitoring a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant. You’ll also learn how to apply DevOps principles to your development practice by using AL-Go for GitHub.
In this book we put a strong focus on integration, covering topics like APIs, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Dataverse, and Power Platform. Integrating with these technologies allows you to create custom applications connected to Dynamics 365 Business Central. In this edition we wanted to expand our coverage of Power Apps in particular, so we have added a detailed project with step-by-step instructions. You’ll learn how to create a fully functional app, complete with offline capabilities.
An exciting new topic in Microsoft is the integration of custom generative AI solutions in Dynamics 365 Business Central by using Azure OpenAI and the Copilot developer toolkit from AL. We’ll wrap up covering how you can configure the Copilot capabilities in Business Central, as well as how to create your own copilots.
Overall, we hope this book will help experienced developers learn the latest tools in the trade and best coding practices to become an expert at developing solutions for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
