​Tools to Enhance Workflow Development

Jared Drueco | June 2, 2022

This weeks workload was filled with many UI changes in Business Central. These changes were needed to prepare for the upcoming migration of one of our client’s data from their current Dynamics GP ERP solution.

Built-in UI Designer

​Throughout the week, I was introduced to a couple of tools that assisted my development workflow in terms of speed and efficient collaboration. One of these tools was the built-in designer in Business Central.

The process of modifying a page in BC can be a bit tedious since it involves constant look up on which fields to reference in the code. Much like styling a web page with CSS, adding and moving around elements to meet a design requirement isn’t always intuitive.

Luckily, the built-in designer allows the developer to visually make these changes within Business Central. After making edits, the designer gives us an option to download the code snippet needed to implement the changes we just made.

Not only did this speed up the modification process, but the code snippets definitely helped me in understanding how different objects in AL interact with each other on a page. How kind of Microsoft!

Patterns In Azure DevOps

At the end of the week, James McCullough (a fellow consultant developer our team works with) provided a training session on Azure DevOps and Git.

We’ve recently added more developers to collaborate on one of Geoson’s working code solutions, and this presentation showed us a couple of patterns to follow so that the collaboration workflow could be as smooth as possible. Some of the concepts covered were: well-written commits and pull requests, branch updating precedences, and Azure pipelines.

I found this information extremely informative since most of my development experience has been through solo effort. Looking forward to learning more about the implementation of DevOps in these system projects, and more best practices when working in a larger team.

Partner Credits:
James McCullough, Managing Partner Evergrowth Consulting evergrowth.ca