1. Development Changes in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

2. Becky Newell Microsoft: 14 years Total Industry Experience: 19 years
VP of Technical Delivery Services
Microsoft: 14 years
Total Industry Experience: 19 years

3. Development Changes in D365
REALLY BIG Architecture Changes
Let’s All Move to Visual Studio
Extensions Make Upgrades Easy
Events for Everyone
Form Patterns - Our New UI Advisor
Navigation in the New World
Introducing Data Entities

4. REALLY BIG Architecture Changes
AOS is an IIS-hosted website
Model database replaced by xml files
AXUtil replaced by ModelUtil
ModelStores replaced by deployment packages

5. Visual Studio is Our New Home
MorphX is gone!
All development work is in VS
New VS project types
Best Practice Rules
Developer Tools Addin
Unified Operations
AOT hosted in the Application Explorer
All of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is web-based, there is no longer a fat AX client and there is no MorphX development environment to get into. All of your development work happens in VS. If you have never worked in VS, there’s a lot to learn. Fortunately, VS is a tool used all over the world. It is well-documented, stable, and feature rich. It will take a while to get used to but you are going to love it. A handful of my favorite features in VS that are not in MorphX are:
1. Automated reference tracking
2. Conditional breakpoints
3. Line numbers that stay on all of the time
4. Refactoring and renaming functions

6. Visual Studio – Home Sweet Home
AOT elements available as new items
X++ language remains the same

7. Extensions
Extension objects enable additions to existing D365 code WITHOUT modifying it
Full-featured eventing model
Eventual elimination of overlayering
Dynamics 365 for Operations includes the introduction of extensions. In all previous versions of AX when modifying or adding to sys or ISV code, you customized or added something to an object which created a potential conflict at upgrade time. In Dynamics 365 this is still possible it is known as a overlayering but now it is not the only way to modify existing code. Microsoft has added an extensions model. With extensions you can extend an object without touching the base object. This means you can add new fields, methods or controls to tables, classes and forms and those additions are contained in your own extension object. Also the base objects have many, many events added to them. In previous versions of AX, you overrode methods so your code would be called when events happened – like a button being clicked. Now the button will raise an event and you can subscribe to that event. By subscribing to the event your code will be called without you having to override or modify the button.

8. Events – How Do I Use Them?
To respond to an event:
Right-click on an event and choose Copy event handler method
In a separate class or in an element’s code-behind, right-click and Paste
**This generates a method stub with an EventHandler attribute
Add code to the method stub
Build and run

9. Form Patterns Will Lead You
In D365 every form gets a form pattern
Controls have sub-patterns
Pattern requirements are displayed in a new panel
The required adherence to form patterns is a very big change. Form patterns are guidelines Microsoft has for how forms should be designed. Microsoft wants all forms in AX to look-and-feel similar regardless of who makes them so the end user has a consistent experience. Form patterns are not a new concept; they exist in AX However, most AX developers were not aware of them in AX 2012 because they were a guideline and not a requirement. In Dynamics 365 when you create a form, the first thing you do in the design of that form is specify the form pattern it is going to follow. If you don’t specify the form pattern, you get many warnings at compile time. As you continue to build the form’s design, the pattern for the form is enforced meaning you must fill out the requirements of the pattern or you will get more warnings. This definitely takes some time to get used to. For more information on form patterns have a look here -

10. New Navigation Features
Tiles are buttons pointing to menu items, KPIs or URLs
Workspaces are a new form pattern
Initial dashboard is a menu called NavPaneMenu

11. Introducing Data Entities
Document service and DIXF framework classes are replaced by a single integration concept—data entities
New data entity wizard added to make building data entities easy
Wizard generates both DIXF and service artifacts
Data entities serve as the new framework for integrating with AX. They are a replacement for two concepts in AX 2012, document services and the classes comprising the Data Import Export Framework (DIXF). With data entities, all data coming into and going out of AX follow the same path so you do not have to build two different things if you are calling an API or using DIXF to manipulate data. The data entities are very easy to create. There is a wizard that walks you through the creation process similar to the wizard in AX 2012 used to generate document services. Another notable change within integrations is that the services exposing data entities are restful state APIs using JSON formatted data. In AX2012 all services were WCF services. This change means the way you call services is significantly different so if you are planning to do integrations on Dynamics 365 you will want to study up on how to call the APIs.

12. Calling Data Entities
Restful state APIs using JSON formatted data to expose data entities

13. Key Takeaways D365 is web-based Visual Studio fully replaces MorphX
Use extensions instead of overlayering
Use events to react to existing code
Form patterns are required for all forms
Integrations will leverage data entities

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