This online course is a series of 4 session about Microsoft Azure DevOps with a focus of AL Development. Personally I can’t picture a life without DevOps anymore, especially when you need to develop (in team) on a multitude of apps, that will be upgrade automatically in the SaaS environment, or that need to be tested against a multitude of localizations or versions of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. DevOps will help you in many ways: implement a workflow for your team, stabilize your code over time, automate testing for multiple versions or localizations, Automate deployment, .. .
Target audience
This course is suitable for anyone in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Development (aka AL Development) that has an interest in making their life a bit more efficient and safe ;-). You don’t even have to understand AL code .. but it does help as that will be the focus and examples that I will use during the courses.
Schedule
| Date | Topic |
| Tuesday, March 23, 2021 | Introduction to SCM en Git |
| Wednesday, March 24, 2021 | Introduction to DevOps & DevOps PipeLines |
| Thursday, March 25, 2021 | Setting up your first build & Release Pipeline |
| Wednesday, March 31, 2021 | Build & Release pipelines with ALOps |
All sessions are at 16:30 CE(S)T (UTC+2). They will be about 60 to 90 minutes. You will be able to ask questions via Teams or by email. And if necessary, individual sessions can be booked.
Costs
The price is €495 excl. VAT per attendee for the complete series of 4 sessions.
Registrations are handled first come first serve. You will receive an invoice and payment link within 2 business days after registration. Invitations for the online session will be sent after the payment has been received.
Prerequisites
You’ll need to have a working instance of VSCode, and it would be useful to have a working Business Central environment to work against.
You will also need to have access to a DevOps collection (https://dev.azure.com/). If necessary, you should always be able to create a temporary free DevOps environment (follow the “Start Free” procedure).
During the workshop, we’ll also be installing a DevOps agent. For this, you need access to a (clean, redundant) Windows server. There are a few options:
- You don’t install an agent, and just follow me doing it during the course
- a windows server that is running somewhere on your network, and you have (admin) access to it.
- An AzureVM that is set up for you by your admins and you have admin access to it
- You have admin access to Azure, and set it up yourself (I’ll tell you how during the course)
- A local Windows Server Hyper-V on your system
Any questions? Don’t hesitate and contact me!
Content
Session 1 – Introduction to SCM and Git
Where it all starts: Source Control Management. We’ll dive into VSCode, how you can do decent SCM with VSCode and Git. Some basics with Git, and an introduction on how to develop as a team, using the out-of-the-box SCM Tools with VSCode. We’ll go a little deeper in some tools to get the most out of your SCM. We’ll also go into branching and other things will need furthermore in the course.
Session 2 – Introduction to DevOps & DevOps PipeLines
In this session, we know what Git is, so time to dive into DevOps, which “understands” Git. We’ll go further in Branching, and set up policies to secure some branches. We’ll also see the basics of CI/CD, which takes us to an even more mature way to work as a team on AL Development.
When we’ve done that, we’ll give an introduction into CI/CD for which I’ll give an introduction in what pipelines are, and what the basics are for setting them up.
Session 3 – Setting up your first build & Release Pipeline
Time to get our hands dirty on pipelines! We’ll set up a complete pipeline from scratch, using the helper tools that Microsoft makes available to the community. Some PowerShell knowledge is useful, but not mandatory.
Session 4 – Build & Release pipelines with ALOps
As a last session, I’d like to take what we learned, and apply that with ALOps, a commercial DevOps extension with built-in pipeline tasks that will make the PowerShell knowledge unnecessary. The reason to use ALOps is to be able to focus on AL specific cases, and not having to lose any time on PowerShell challenges to manage them. The cases we’ll be handling during the sessions involve:
- How to handle breaking changes
- How to handle dependencies
- How to handle app versioning
- Practical/Typical pipelines for AL Apps
Other interesting courses
To get more in depth knowledge of related topics, I can recommend these courses as well:
Or, if you’d like for me to help you getting started after this course, here’s another opportunity: DevOps for AL Development – 1on1 hands-on workshop (waldo.be)
If you have any feedback on this content, or you have topics that you would like to see during this course as well .. don’t hesitate and contact me!
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