I’m returning back from yet another great Directions US event in Las Vegas this time. At this point – I’m sitting in the lounge in New York – a great opportunity to do a short post about something I didn’t really expect, and now I’m quite obligated to do.. .

I total, I did about 13 hours of sessions and workshops. That’s a lot. I never was busier – mainly because of Vjeko, who couldn’t join this year, and where I agreed to take over his sessions on Artificial Intelligence. That was a great experience – not only because it was very well prepared by Vjeko, but also for me the perfect opportunity to dive into the matter. I loved it!

DevOps

But that’s not really what I want to put on the table. I also had a session (+ workshops) about DevOps together with Freddy. My part was “DevOps in practice“, where I showed how we implemented DevOps in our company, which is a VAR and ISV – so basically: to solve the real-world development challenges in a typical Business Central partner company. The main part was that we developed a DevOps Extension for managing all the customers and products in a standard way in DevOps. My intention was to just show it as an idea on how you can manage multiple repositories in DevOps in a very maintainable way – but after the session, I had so many people that were interested in the extension. Well – my call to action is clear: let’s get it out there! I can’t tell you how I will do that, but I will definitely do my best to get it out there for you to be able to easily set up builds for products and customers, including dependencies, versioning, testability, … in a matter of minutes!

Dependency Analysis

I was also involved in a session regarding “Migrating your solution to extensions” together with Gary. In that session, I basically did again a part on “how do we do it”, where I put a lot of attention to – what we call – a “dependency analysis“. Just because in my opinion, if you think ahead, you’ll have much more chance to do it right. This analysis is mostly an automated way to visualize the dependencies of your code, based on the code that you already have written in C/AL. You might already guess that the main tool we used for this is the one I addressed in this blogpost. We combined that with an Extension and webgraphviz to visualize.

I showed how we were able to basically completely visualize our codebase like this:

And turned that into a dependent app collection, like this:

This is a generated graph, by analyzing code and tagging objects – so we are quite sure it makes sense ;-).

Again, lots of people were interested and wanted to do the same – so my call to action is to see what I can do to help you in this ;-).

Stay tuned for more! If you will be at “Days Of Knowledge” in two weeks – I will be talking about both topics in my session “development methodologies for the future”.

Thanks again for once again an outstanding edition of Directions US! – Always a blast to meet everyone!