Where to find Azure Virtual Machine RDP port

Here you go

TF command line to fix the error: Mapping on the working folder is already in use

 Just to document my command line to get rid of this blocking error.

My environment is under Azure DevOps version control and some other user already created a workspace on this computer.

Close Visual Studio (2017 in my case) and open the command line. It can be open via Developer Command Prompt for VS 2017; so you would not need to provide the entire path to tf.exe.

Next, run a tf command to delete the workspace created by the previous user (Name and Surname)

tf workspace /delete DEV365-FO-VM-3;"Name Surname" /collection:https://YOURCOMPANYPROJECT.visualstudio.com

Then stop all locally running D365FO services, like Web Publishing, Batch processing, etc, in order to avoid errors with locked files in your K:\AosService\PackagesLocalDirectory subfolders.

Now you can open Visual Studio, connect to Azure DevOps server, create a new workspace, map your folders for projects and metadata, and get latest.

My first D365FO Build pipeline with Microsoft-hosted agent

This contains some particular details and explanatory images which can be useful while following the basic Microsoft article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/dev-tools/hosted-build-automation

Thanks Joris for the NuGet packages and other colleagues for their help.

So, my goal is to create a Build pipeline for Version 18, and my deployable package must have a few ISV models, one of which is provided as libraries and source code.

Personal Access Token

First create or update your Personal Access Token and copy-paste it in a secure place (I mean Notepad++, of course). This will be used as a password for uploading Nuget packages to your Artifacts feed later.

Create a feed

Create nuget.config file and place it together with Nuget files as described in the next part.

NuGet packages

Get NuGet packages from LCS shared asset library.

Place these files in a special NuGet folder and create or update packages.config file.

Add them to the source controlled folder. DEV must be mapped too.

Publish packages by using the command line

Now open Windows command prompt to publish these Nuget files to your feed.

Use your Personal Access Token as a password.

Once uploading is done, you can check that the feed contains all packages.

Creating the pipeline

Before importing or creating a pipeline, install Azure DevOps pipeline tools Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations from Marketplace in your Extensions.

I export a pipeline from one organization and then import it to mine.

Then check and update the project name and relevant folder references, change variables and triggers, if needed.

Visual Studio build step

As one of my ISV provided in mix code/binaries mode, I need to reference its non X++-libraries at this step.

/p:ReferencePath A semicolon-separated list of paths that contain any non-X++ binaries that are referenced and required for compilation. You should include the location of the extracted Compiler Tools NuGet package, because it might contain required references.

So, once triggered it builds the solution, creates a deployable deployable package and publishes it.

Published artifacts can be found here.

Catastrophic Failure

 Thirteen years with Axapta and finally got it today!

Maximum Size for Business Events

Business Events help to integrate D365FO with other systems; they are supposed to be specific and small. But how exactly small should they be? What is the maximum size for one message?

If we take a look at the code, we will see that the maximum is driven by the type of Business Event End Point:

Some of these classes specifically set their max. 

For example, BusinessEventsServiceBusAdapter even implements some logic here.

As per Flow and HTTP, it is defined as 1MB minus 4KB for the header.

So, we have two conclusions here:

- we have to check these hard-coded limits directly in the code, as they may be changed in future;

- if you need to send a chunk of information bigger than the maximum size, you'd better revise your solution. For example, instead of sending a file you can send just its Azure Storage locator;

Another option can be developing your own End Point.

Some useful links.

How to develop Business Events

How to use Business Events

Example of using Microsoft Power Automate (Flow) to integrate with D365FO via Business Events  

Switch in View Computed column

 If you need to compare multiple fields in your view while populating a computed column, take into consideration that the standard implementation of method SysComputedColumn::switch uses a map enumerator. 

public static client server str switch(str _controlExpression, Map _comparisonExpressionMap, str _defaultExpression)
    {
        MapEnumerator  mapEnumerator;
        str caseExpression = '';

        caseExpression ='CASE ' + _controlExpression;
        mapEnumerator = _comparisonExpressionMap.getEnumerator();
        while (mapEnumerator.moveNext())
        {
            caseExpression += ' WHEN ' + mapEnumerator.currentKey() + ' THEN ' + mapEnumerator.currentValue();
        }
        caseExpression += ' ELSE ' + _defaultExpression;
        caseExpression += ' END';

        return caseExpression;
    }

It means that your given order will be replaced in final SQL clause by alphabetical one of your keys.

CASE  
	WHEN (T4.PROJID1) != ('') THEN T4.PROJNAME1 
	WHEN (T4.PROJID2) != ('') THEN T4.PROJNAME2 
	WHEN (T4.PROJID3) != ('') THEN T4.PROJNAME3 
	ELSE T4.PROJNAME END

For example, we want to populate field mgcProjInvoiceGLTransView.ParentProjectName for a given project id up to three level up in the project hierarchy. Let's assume that they are prepopulated in mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView view: projId1 is the parent of projId, projId2 is the parent of projId1, and so on.

Once we reference this computed column to the following method, we will get a new order in CASE construction on the SQL side.

 private static str projNameParent()
    {
        str         ret;
        SysComputedColumnBase::switch cannot keep a given order while using Map enumerator; so we put the SQL string as a string constant
        tableName   viewName                    = identifierStr(mgcProjInvoiceGLTransView);
        tableName   tableName                   = identifierStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView);
        str         compareValue                = '';


        Map         comparisonExpressionMap     = SysComputedColumn::comparisionExpressionMap();
        str         fieldNameProjName3          = SysComputedColumn::returnField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjName3));
        str         fieldNameProjName2          = SysComputedColumn::returnField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjName2));
        str         fieldNameProjName1          = SysComputedColumn::returnField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjName1));
        str         fieldNameProjName           = SysComputedColumn::returnField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjName));

        comparisonExpressionMap.insert(
        SysComputedColumn::notEqualExpression(
            SysComputedColumn::comparisonField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjId3)),
            SysComputedColumn::comparisonLiteral(compareValue)),
        fieldNameProjName3);

        comparisonExpressionMap.insert(
        SysComputedColumn::notEqualExpression(
            SysComputedColumn::comparisonField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjId2)),
            SysComputedColumn::comparisonLiteral(compareValue)),
        fieldNameProjName2);

        comparisonExpressionMap.insert(
        SysComputedColumn::notEqualExpression(
            SysComputedColumn::comparisonField(viewName, tableName, fieldStr(mgcProjInvoiceOnAccView, ProjId1)),
            SysComputedColumn::comparisonLiteral(compareValue)),
        fieldNameProjName1);

        ret       = SysComputedColumn::switch(
                                                '',
                                                comparisonExpressionMap,
                                                fieldNameProjName);
        return ret;
    }

Of course, it always returns  the name of the parent on the first level, even though it had its own parent, which is incorrect result. 

Therefore, the easiest way is to replace the aforementioned construction with a simple string.

 private static str projNameParent()
    {
        str         ret;
        ret = "CASE WHEN (T4.PROJID3) != ('') THEN T4.PROJNAME3 WHEN (T4.PROJID2) != ('') THEN T4.PROJNAME2 WHEN (T4.PROJID1) != ('') THEN T4.PROJNAME1 ELSE T4.PROJNAME END";
        return ret;
    }

Corrupted copy of SSRS report

Sometimes after copying an existing SSRS report or even just a part of its design, parser starts encountering strange errors. For example:

Unidentifiable substring 'Value' in expression. the parser reported error message

There must be something wrong in the mechanism responsible for copying text boxes. In most case, it replaces simple function names with predicates like Microsoft.Value etc. In my case it turned out to be even worse: some bug in strings concatenation; no matter what.

The problem here is that you have no hint about the object name, where such a non-conform string was added. You can try your textboxes one by one by checking all their properties with functions inside: visibility, font, border etc, even labels for its placeholder! And it can become a nightmare when your report contains dozens of them.

Fortunately there is a some workaround. You can open XML files for both of the original report and your copy of it in Notepad++ and run Compare over them (Install this Compare plugin).

Then scroll down to the first bad guy: a couple of strings above you will see its name.

Go back to the editor, find this textbox.

Now check its corrupted property function expressions and fix it.