Dynamics 365 Business Central Development Quick Start Guide: Modern development techniques for Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics NAV requires consistent initial investments to purchase or rent, if hosted, the required redundant hardware and software to guarantee high availability and a smooth daily activity. Moreover, it needs experienced IT staff to manage the whole system deployment monolith.

Once the system is fully functional, it also needs to be maintained. From time to time, the entire hardware will need to be upgraded, and additional software will also need to be added.

Keep in mind that a Microsoft life cycle has typically an on-premises mainstream life cycle of five years. After that period, Microsoft products have an extra five years of limited support (out of mainstream), where it is not possible anymore to enable the escalation chain to the relevant development team and only security hotfixes are guaranteed. After five years, then, Microsoft warmly suggests that the partner and the customer upgrade to the latest version.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, there is no initial deployment cost. With the pay-as-you-go offering philosophy, customers simply have to choose, according to their business needs, an essential and/or premium user experience, depending on the application modules they need.

There is no need to take care of any hardware maintenance: Microsoft guarantees the underlying software to run on the latest technologies and fully patched with a close to zero or no downtime at all, and with a class-A uptime SLA.

Companies that store data internally, on-premises, have complete control over it in terms of accessibility (read) and maintenance (insert, update, delete) rights. But great power comes with great responsibility. IT departments are responsible to guarantee the appropriate privacy and respect their own, local, and legal rules. In Europe, the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) defines clearly how to rank and handle it. This is a cost for all companies that are requested today to implement, maintain and monitor those rules in all business processes.

The same applies to the hosting environment: if you are delivering a hosting service, then you have to update your business process and enpower your staff to cope with security and legally guarantee the security level requested, at least, by the current laws in your country. If you are the CEO, CFO, or IT manager of a company that uses outsourced hosting services for your ERP, then you have probably signed an SLA where your hosting provider guarantees the security of your own data. The cost of the service is higher according to the level of security.

There are no companies in the world that can guarantee the highest service SLA guaranteed by Microsoft Cloud security policies offered with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Being a cloud service (always up to date), it is already compliant with all the regulations of the countries where it is deployed, included in the GDPR. There is no extra cost to pay.

With Microsoft Dynamics NAV, performance is the responsibility of the implementor, unless the cause is to be found in the standard application. In this case, Microsoft needs to respond and provide a hotfix or guidance regarding how to resolve it.

As a partner or customer, you might make your own decision to choose whatever hardware resources you want, according to your budget. As a partner or customer, you might change whatever configuration parameter in your Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server and/or decide to customize the application in its core to be tailored perfectly and tightly to your business needs and growth pace.

One of the biggest advantages of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, compared to all the other ERP products in the world: It is open to almost every kind of customization and uses an object-based language that’s pretty simple to learn and master.

But, with great power comes great responsibility.

If your hardware resource implementation and/or your configuration settings and/or custom application code changes bring the overall application to slow down, in terms of performance, compared to the baseline, then it is also your duty to investigate, troubleshoot, and mitigate the issue.

You break it, you fix it.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, as all modern SaaS propositions, comes with a fully tested standard application targeted for the SMB load. So, what is the SMB load? There is no rule of thumb but just a raw and simple definition for the SMB territory, from a marketing perspective, which is described like a business application used by 1 up to 250 users.This broad marketing concept does not appropriately match with objective technical considerations. Most probably, the definition could or should potentially be changed in favor of a number of transactions, per unit of time. But also this measure, in some circumstances, could be not enough to let stakeholders decide what hardware to buy and which configuration to apply.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central comes equipped with a very high technology telemetry implemented at all software and hardware levels. The Microsoft operation service engineers could quickly determine whether there are performance issues, whether these are hardware or software based, whether these affect single or multiple tenants, and in a short time determine the root cause of these and mitigate them, at the required cloud speed.

If the root cause is not isolated but potentially applies to all tenants (for example, a missing database index or a suboptimal code), then this will be ported to the application or infrastructure and in the next iteration, also known as a tenant update, so that all the customers will clearly benefit from this.

On-premises installations require today highly specialized projects to design the current hardware infrastructure to cope with the contingent business process needs and the consequent data load and its periodicity or seasonality. 

Since projects might start several months before they go live, and typically SMB companies are very flexible and adapt fast, at the moment production starts, the business conditions and the data transaction quality and quantity might have been changed. Then, the project stakeholders have to tweak and tune the infrastructure configuration by changing this at different levels: application (code changes), infrastructure (configurations), and hardware (add more resources). Scalability of resources is crucial for SMB ERP, and it requires time to implement the right strategy at the right time, and it is an ever-changing dynamic process.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central uses the full power of the Microsoft Azure cloud, and telemetry could detect all types of needs at once. Scalability and resource economy is in the nature of the SaaS-based solution.

With Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture, partners and customers have complete control over infrastructure and application upgrades. They might decide when and what to apply, and how they want to apply it. It is trivial to say that the cost of upgrade, in terms of project analysis for staging and production, resource and time allocation, and so on is the upon partner and customer.  

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central allows partners and customers to focus on the application business process and their daily activities.

Hardware and software upgrades are continuous within a periodical cadence. Currently, featured application updates happen roughly every three months, but these dates are not set in stone; they fluctuate. Typically, this happens in a transparent way, with zero downtime for end users.

In the On-Premise Microsoft Dynamics NAV there is still Classic CSIDE Development Environment available to change the standard code, together with the Modern Development Environment that consists of an Extension (VSIX) for Visual Studio Code. Almost all the On Premises installation base for Microsoft Dynamics NAV is customized using Classic Development through CSIDE with more deeper and deeper changes in the standard application, depending on specific business needs.

The classic development comes with very high flexibility and gives partners and customers more freedom when it comes to an end product that deeply satisfies customer requirements and fits like a glove around the company IT core application and integrations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central uses only the modern development paradigm through the creation of business extensions validated by Microsoft and uploaded in the AppSource marketplace. Modern development for SaaS-based solutions does not allow for the making of any core changes to the standard application, but simply extends it.

At the moment, there are still pretty a discrete number of restrictions and limitations when it comes to providing a SaaSified solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, compared to the equivalent classic development.

Even as I write this, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central development team is working to reduce the gap between the classic and modern development types and guarantees partner and independent software vendors (ISVs) a smooth and fast transition between the two, to let AppSource grow quickly in a number of available vertical solutions, add-ons, and localizations.

We will have a deep dive in customizations in a later chapter.

Another point in favor of on premises Microsoft Dynamics NAV is the capability to choose between windows or web client deployment. Windows client represents the evolution of the Navision Classic Client. Deployed for the first time in October 2008 as a role tailored client with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, it has been heavily refactored and enriched during the past 10 years.

Thanks to its great features, capability, tailored user experience, and productivity, it represents today the vast majority of the client type deployment for Microsoft Dynamics NAV installations.

Despite being a valid and lightweight deployment type, the web client still has its own feature and browser limitations. These are described here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-nav/feature-limitations-of-the-microsoft-dynamics-nav-web-client.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, today, can only be accessed through a web client using the most common web browsers or deployed as an app on phone or tablet devices.

Even while I write this, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central development team is working to reduce the feature limitations and gaps between the Windows and the web client and improve its productivity.