ERP applications are built for generic industry requirements, and most of the customers implementing an ERP system need some level of customization application to satisfy their unique business requirements. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operation development environment uses Visual Studio as the only integrated development environment (IDE) for development. The Finance and Operations Visual Studio extension provides a full set of development capabilities within the Visual Studio Code editor.
The following diagram shows the development environment architecture:
The following are key highlights of the Finance and Operations development architecture:
- Operations Extensions provides the developer, application explorer, X++ code editor, project system, user interface designer, debugger, and other tools to extend the existing functionalities and add new ones.
- The source code is stored in the development environment filesystem as XML files (Model store) and used by the Metadata API of the Visual Studio extension for the editing and design experience.
- The build process compiles application source code to .NET CIL/DLL files (Model binaries).
- In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, X++ is a 100% managed language running in the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR).
- Local runtime is deployed on the development machine to provide a debugging experience.
- Visual Studio can also be used to create a deployable package to promote the application code to the test and production environments.
- Visual Studio can be configured with Azure DevOps for source control, and then Azure DevOps build and release pipelines can be used for automated build and automated deployment to the test and production environments.
- There are distinct source code, design time, and runtime concepts in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, as shown in the following screenshot:
We will discuss the development environment, development concepts, and practices in more detail in Chapter 9, Customization and Extensions.