When you want to get started with using NAV/BC containers and have an Azure subscription, then the very easy route is to just use one of Microsoft's quickstart ARM templates like http://aka.ms/getbc. This will create a VM on Azure with Docker, one pre-defined container, navcontainerhelper, VS Code and all the bells and whistles you might…
I recently encountered a somewhat unexpected behavior of the NAV / Business Central Service Tier when running multiple instances connected to the same database. It sometimes happens that our heavily code customized solution behaves differently than a standard Cronus database, so I decided to try to repro in a standard out-of-the-box environment. Of course I…
If you have been working with Docker on Windows, the following message is probably familiar: error during connect: Get http://%2F%2F.%2Fpipe%2Fdocker_engine/v1.40/containers/json: open //./pipe/docker_engine: The system cannot find the file specified. In the default daemon configuration on Windows, the docker client must be run elevated to connect. This error may also indicate that the docker daemon is…
On December 3-5 I enjoyed my first DockerCon: With 2,200 attendees in Barcelona DockerCon Europe was about a third of DockerCon US in San Francisco with 6,000 attendees but still a large enough event. In its current state of building on open source roots and trying to make money from enterprise customers through their corresponding…
At DockerCon Europe 2018, Israel Vega from Microsoft and Steven Follis from Docker (@steven_follis) had a session called "Avoiding an identity crisis" talking about Windows / Active Directory authentication for containers. A really good introduction and also a lot of interesting information if you are already working with win auth in containers. For example I…
At NAV TechDays 2018 I was lucky enough to host two 1-day workshops and a session around Docker on Windows and Business Central on Docker. It really was great fun but during the first day of my workshop I noticed that getting feedback on when people were ready with the current topic wasn't easy. But…
First of all: NAV TechDays 2018 once again was an amazing conference, both organization and content were very impressive. Luc van Dyck and the team continue to keep up an extremely high level and even improve. Thanks a lot, I already look forward to next year, whether I again will have the honor to present…
Uncategorized
Directions EMEA 2018 is over and it once again was an amazing conference with impressive keynotes, good content and of course a lot of interesting discussions. Most of alle Microsoft's effort to bring the product but also the partners in the right direction with repeatable IP, product-focused business, professional dev and ops tooling while not…
Uncategorized
I've written about the Business Central Connect API before and explained how you can use my ALRunner extension to create an API-enabled Azure Container Instance (ACI) and use it to do serverless API development. I have extended that a bit and will show you a quick walkthrough as well as a bit of background. The…
Microsoft has rebranded and extended their SaaS ALM offering Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to Azure DevOps. I usually had an eye on what is happening with VSTS but as we are using an on-prem Team Foundation Server, I mostly don't have the hands-on experience, so this relaunch was a good reason do really dig…
Conference season is coming up and I am quite happy to be speaking and hosting workshops on Directions EMEA and NAV TechDays: Directions EMEA, Oct 29-31, The Hague, Netherlands Session "How to manage the lifecycle of volume verticals, including extensions 2.0", Wednesday Oct 31, 11 am Session "Real life scenarios and best practices for using…
Uncategorized
Tobias already explained how we can easily load balance the NAV Webclient via traefik. Load balancing the Windows client is a bit more complicated... TL;DR NAV uses TCP connections with a proprietary protocol for the Windows client communication and HTTP connections for the webclient and the webservices. Also the Windows and webclient require sticky sessions…
Microsoft Planner is a nice project planning tool which still has some shortcomings but also a lot of benefits and we are giving it a try. However there are two topics somewhat hampering our progress: To the best of my knowledge there is no way to backup a plan and also no possibility to have…
Uncategorized
I explained here that you can easily use gMSAs in a Docker Swarm to enable Windows authentication. I have only used a Windows Server Core image to show that it works, but of course the goal for me is running a NAV/BC image with a Windows authenticated WebClient in a Docker Swarm. If you are…
As I very recently wrote, Windows authentication for Docker containers on Windows Server 2019 made a huge step in the right direction by losing the need for identically named containers and gMSAs. But that unfortunately will be reality only some time in the future and with Windows Server 2012 (R2) still very much in use…
Windows authentication in Docker containers is kind of a tricky subject and while containers in general are gaining momentum every day, containers on Windows are having a somewhat less steep increase and Windows authentication in that context is the niche in a niche. Still, that topic matters if you have users depending on Windows authentication…
If you just want to have a Dynamics NAV / BC environment up and running without caring for anything around it, Azure Container Instances might be a very good way to go. I've explained about that here and here. One of the main problems there was that you could only use unsecured http or a…
I've been using VS Code for almost all dev and editing tasks for the last months and honestly couldn't be happier. The only thing missing for me and the reason why I occasionally still used PowerShell ISE was psedit for remote file editing. It basically allows you to open a remote session in your editor…
Uncategorized
One of the requirements of publishing a Business Central app (extension V2) into AppSource is an automated test package. That obviously makes a lot of sense but how to get there is not an entirely clear path. Microsoft shares their example code and some guidelines here but creating the test code is only half of…
Visual Studio Code is one of the hottest code editors / IDEs on the market and if you've been following this blog, you know that I am one of the biggest fans. A new feature that really makes it stand out from the crowd (together with "traditional" Visual Studio, where this also works) is VS…