Code Compass

Introduction In today’s fast-moving world of software development, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are key to building and releasing updates quickly and reliably. For Business Central developers, AL-Go for GitHub makes this process easy by using GitHub Actions to automate builds, testing, and deployments. It comes with ready-to-use templates that help you set up a complete CI/CD pipeline in minutes so you can focus more on coding and less on managing workflows. Each build typically takes around 20 minutes when using containers, which fits comfortably within GitHub’s free limits for most projects 2,000 minutes per month for private repositories on the Free tier, 3,000 minutes on the Team tier, and up to 50,000 minutes on the Enterprise tier. Since public repositories get unlimited free minutes, AL-Go for GitHub offers an affordable and powerful way to maintain professional DevOps practices without extra costs. Overall, it’s a simple, cost-efficient, and deve...

Introduction When working on big projects, it can be hard to quickly find classes, methods, or properties spread across different libraries. Searching through files one by one takes too much time. This is where metadata search in Visual Studio helps. It lets you explore and navigate types from external libraries (like .NET assemblies or NuGet packages) even if you don’t have the source code. Visual Studio creates a readable view of the compiled metadata, so you can instantly see definitions and details, almost like built-in documentation. References Metadata search - Visual Studio Usage In Visual Studio, go to Dynamics 365 > Metadata Search  OR  Ctrl + R, Ctrl + S . Start typing the name of the element you are looking for. Results appear as you type. Double-click a result to go directly to that metadata or code. You can also right-click to add items to your project. You can filter via the follow criteria: Name : Search by element name (default).  Type : Limit by type, ...

Introduction As of August 2025, the number of third-party apps available for Dynamics 365 Business Central on Microsoft AppSource is estimated to be between 4,000 and 6,500. Microsoft regularly publishes marketplace updates, with 200–300 new offers added monthly across all product lines, a significant portion of which are Business Central extensions.  It's clear that the Business Central ecosystem is rapidly growing, making extension update management increasingly critical. The majority of clients we've worked with use third-party modules to enhance their business processes, making the management of extension updates a critical part of our environment health checklist. References Apps added to MS App Source MSLearn | Automatically update appsource apps with business central updates Configuration If you don’t have access to the Business Central Admin Center, your only option is to uninstall the extension and then reinstall it from AppSource. However, if you do have access to the...

Introduction A Security Group is a way to group users together so that you can give access to all of them at once. For example, if everyone in the Finance team needs access to certain files or apps, you can add them to a group and give the group permission instead of doing it for each person. In Office365, Security Groups are managed through Azure Active Directory, which handles sign-ins and user identities in Microsoft 365.  They help IT teams save time, stay organized, and keep company data safe. The same Security Groups you create in Azure Active Directory (AAD) can also be used in Dynamics 365 Business Central to manage user permissions. Instead of giving access to each user one by one in Business Central, you can connect a Security Group to a set of permissions. Then, anyone added to that group in Azure AD will automatically get the same permissions in Business Central. They’re also helpful when you want to control environment-level access, especially if your company uses diff...

Introduction A job queue lets users set up and manage background tasks that run automatically.  These tasks can be scheduled to run on a recurring schedule. For a long time, users had a common problem in Business Central—when a job queue failed, there was no alert or warning. You’d only notice something was wrong when a regular task didn’t run for a few days. Some people tried to fix this by setting up another job queue to watch and restart failed ones. But that didn’t always work, especially if an update happened at the same time. Now, Microsoft has finally added a built-in way to get alerts when a job queue fails.  You can get notified either inside Business Central or by using Business Events. In this blog, we'll see the process of leveraging the Business Events to set up notifications on job queue statuses. References MS Learn - Get in-product notifications about issues with job queue background processing MS Learn - Job Queue Configuration Search for "Assisted Setup"...