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 In our small development team, we usually merge code without formal pull requests. Instead, changes are committed directly by the developer responsible for the project, and while I don’t need to approve every change in my role as the senior developer, I still need to stay aware of what’s being merged.  Manually reviewing each commit was becoming too time-consuming, so I built an automated process using Power Automate, Azure DevOps, and Azure AI. Now, whenever a commit is made, it triggers a workflow that summarizes the changes and sends me an email. This simple system keeps me informed without slowing down the team’s work. Although I kept the automation straightforward, it could easily be extended further. For example, it could be improved to allow me to reply directly to the committer from the email or even display file changes in detail using a text comparison feature in Outlook. We didn’t need that level of detail, but it’s a good option if deeper insights are ever ...

Introduction There are 100 million developers around the globe who use Git. However, if you want to work with customizations in Finance and Operations, you need to learn how to use TFS. Initially, I was frustrated and confused about this requirement, but as I learned more about how projects are structured both locally and in TFS, things started to make sense. TFS (Team Foundation Server) is Microsoft’s take on source control management, continuously released and improved since 2005. TFS keeps the source code centralized and tightly integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem. Despite the differences, if you are familiar with Git, transitioning to TFS shouldn’t be too difficult. TFS shares similar concepts with Git, such as checking in, branching, merging, version tracking, and other standard features of a source control management system. Understanding these similarities can make learning TFS easier and help you leverage its full potential in Finance and Operations projects. Pre-requisites...