One Dynamics, One Platform –

Online Environment first time setup instructions

Thank you for your interest in the private preview of the new Online Environments for F&O and
Dataverse, we are glad you are here. Before we begin, some information about the first time setup
process:

1. Please set aside ~3hr for the end-to-end process. Most of the time will be spent downloading
and unpacking software as well as waiting for the environment to be provisioned, however it
would be preferable if you could allocate time in a single block as we will ask you to time your
experience.
2. Before you begin, please make sure to have, installed and ready to go:
a. A Windows 11 machine with 8GB RAM minimum (16GB vastly preferrable)
b. A clean install of Visual Studio 2019, any edition with workload ‘desktop development
with .net’. If your version has either the Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio or the
X++ Tools extensions installed, please remove them before you begin.
c. SQL Server LocalDB (preferably) or SQL Server 2019. If using SQL Server LocalDB, please
refer to the setup instruction at the provided link and perform a basic install
d. If you are using a local machine, we would prefer that you don’t use VMs or any
virtualization software. If you are using a cloud instance, we ask that you don’t use a
Cloud Hosted Environment and instead prefer an Azure DevBox VM
e. A valid D365 Finance license with at least 6GB of F&O Database, as well as a Dataverse
Database with at least 3GB available. For detailed steps on how to confirm these see
Step0 below.
3. As you proceed with the install, we would greatly appreciate if you could take some notes,
especially measuring the approximate time it takes to complete the steps. You can use the
feedback worksheet at the end of this document to keep track of your progress. Once you are
done, we are asking you to complete the feedback form at
https://forms.office.com/r/E3yFEY9qui.

Step 0: Check license and capacity requirements

In Power Platform admin center, environment templates and applications are gated behind a license and
capacity check. For example, to deploy an environment with Dynamics 365 Field Service, the user doing
the deployment needs a Field Service license. The same will be true for the F&O suite of apps such as
Finance, Supply Chain, Commerce, Project Operations, and Human Resources.

For the private preview, we have just made available the following licenses for provisioning.

• Dynamics 365 Finance

• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
• Dynamics 365 Commerce
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations
• Dynamics 365 Operations Partner Application Sandbox

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 Check your license and service plans
First, check that you have a Finance license by going to Office – My Account and click on the
Subscriptions tab:

Scroll until you see the Dynamics 365 F&O license, and confirm you see the “Common Data Service for
Dynamics 365 X” service plan listed. “X” will be related to the license name, such as “Finance” below.
The same would appear for Supply Chain, Commerce, Project Operations, and so forth.

If you don’t have an applicable license license, nor a similar highlighted service plan then you will not be
able to deploy the environment template (or install the F&O app on any existing environment) from
PPAC. A license is an absolute requirement to deploy.

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 Check your available capacity in PPAC
To deploy an environment for Online Development, you will require both Dataverse and F&O storage to
be available. Each environment in PPAC consumes space and with demo data installed you will need 3GB
of Dataverse Database, and 6GB of Finance and Operations Database available.

To check this, visit Power Platform admin center – Capacity page. From here, confirm that you have 3GB
of Dataverse DB available, and 6GB of F&O DB available:

Also, be sure that you are not negative any of the other capacity types such as File/Log where applicable.
If you don’t have enough capacity available then you will be unable to deploy the new environment from
PPAC.

If you have made it this far, you’re ready to proceed to Step1 congratulations!

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 Step 1: Provision the environment

Note: Environment creation currently requires roughly 1h to complete. Once you trigger the
environment creation, please continue with Step 2 without waiting for this step to complete.

Online Development environments can only be provisioned via command line. We have a PowerShell
module available for PPAC admins to manage their tenant policies and environments. Follow the steps
on Programmability & Extensibility – PowerShell – Get Started and then use the following command to
create the environment:

Parameter Value
name

DisplayName Environment name, it should be less than 20 characters.

Note: If you recently deleted an environment, do not provision new environment with
same environment name. The old environment will be in soft delete state and it’s
environment name will still be in use. Please use different environment name.

In the sample replace “UnoEnvName1” with your own environment name.

Templates Based on the license the tenant has this parameter would vary. See the table below to
choose the right value

License Template Name Comments

Dynamics 365 Finance D365_FinOps_Finance

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain D365_FinOps_SCM Includes Planning

Management Optimization add-in /
microservice
automatically.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations D365_FinOps_ProjOps Includes Dual-write

maps initialization for
ProjOps scenarios.

Dynamics 365 Commerce D365_FinOps_Finance Temporary until

Commerce template is
available.

Dynamics 365 Operations Partner D365_FinOps_Finance Used by partners and

Application Sandbox ISVs today to get a
Sandbox Tier2 in LCS.
This is a user license
that can be assigned
to an admin to deploy
in PPAC as well.

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 LocationName Geo location of the environment. Please choose ‘canada’ since the preview is supported
only in this Geo.

#Command 1 - To add powerapps account

Add-PowerAppsAccount

#Command 2 - To construct the json object to pass in command 3

$jsonObject= @"
{
"PostProvisioningPackages":
[
{
"applicationUniqueName": "msdyn_FinanceAndOperationsProvisioningAppAnchor",
"parameters": "DevToolsEnabled=true|DemoDataEnabled=true"
}
]
}
”@ | ConvertFrom-Json

# Command 3 - To kick off new environment deployment

# IMPORTANT - This has to be a single line, after the copy & paste the command
New-AdminPowerAppEnvironment -DisplayName “UnoEnvName1” -EnvironmentSku Sandbox -Templates
D365_FinOps_Finance -TemplateMetadata $jsonObject -LocationName canada -ProvisionDatabase

DISCLAIMER – Not all lifecycle operations are supported on these preview environments
Today we only support environment creation and environment delete. We don’t support yet the Copy,
Backup, Restore, Reset, Convert to Production lifecycle operations when F&O is involved. We will be
adding these capabilities over the coming months.

Enable developers to use the environment

If you are the admin doing the provisioning, but will not be the developer using Visual Studio, you may
add the developers to the newly created environment once it is finished deploying. In this way, they can
connect to it in Visual Studio and create customizations/extensions.

In your new environment go to the Users section:

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 All users who have a Dynamics 365 license will be already automatically added to your environment with
the Finance & Operations Basic User role. You can however manually add more users. Developers, to
use the Visual Studio tooling, will need the System Administrator or the System Customizer role
depending on how much access you wish for them to have.

To manage the roles, select a user and click on the Manage Security Roles button across the top menu.
Then add the desired role and click Save.

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 To manage the same user’s access in F&O still requires managing the users in the System Administration
module inside of the F&O application itself. To do this, go to the Environment you created in PPAC and
find the Finance and Operations URL:

This will take you in to your normal F&O app experience and you can add the developer as a user with
the System Admin role or other role as required. Only the user who created the environment will be the
initial ‘Admin’ F&O user, but they can add more people as necessary.

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 Step 2: Download and Install the Visual Studio Extension for Power Platform

Private preview instructions:

1) Download PowerPlatformTools.vsix file from yammer group files tab

2) Install VSIX by double clicking the file

Note: if your workstation already has the previous version, please uninstall before you install this version.

Public preview instructions:

What is Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Step 3: Setup environment variable

Note: This is needed only for Private preview, and we would take out this step during Public preview
timeframe.

DOWNLOADFINOPSCLIENTASSETS AND SET IT TO TRUE, AS SHOWN BELOW

Step 4: Connect to Online development environment

Once you have setup Power platform Visual Studio extension, now it is time to connect to Online
development environment.

Note: Ensure that your administrator gave you the System Customizer or System Administrator role (if
you didn’t create the environment yourself). For more information, see Step1 above.

a) In Visual Studio use the Tools -> Connect to Dataverse option. Choose not to use the signed in user
(in case you need to use another account with a VS license) and type in the credentials as necessary
to match the user added to Dataverse in Step1.

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 b) Select solution as shown below and click “Done”

c) From there, you will be presented with a list of Dataverse “organizations” or databases deployed Find
the environment created for Online Development and connect to it:

Note: If you have only one online development environment, this dialog may not be shown, and it would
automatically connect to the environment

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 Step 5: Download F&O visual studio extension and metadata for Microsoft modules

PreReq: You need at least 5 GB of free space in the system drive

Note: If this prompt doesn’t show up, either the step is 3 is not done right or your online environment is
an older version than 10.0.35

Click ok, to start the download.

Visual studio will notify you once the download is completed.

Note: VS may not be responsive while downloading the assets

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 Step 5: Extract system metadata

Downloaded assets would be in the following location:

C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Dynamics365\<ApplicationVersion>

2 files are downloaded

• F&O extension is downloaded as Microsoft.Dynamics.Framework.Tools.Installer.vsix

• System metadata as PackagesLocalDirectory.zip.

Unpack the PackagesLocalDirectory.zip as PackagesLocalDirectory

TODO - “7zip” – tool and how to exclude the above folder from antivirus

Step 6: Install the Visual Studio Extension for F&O

From this location.

C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Dynamics365\<ApplicationVersion>

Click Microsoft.Dynamics.Framework.Tools.Installer.vsix to install extension

Step 7: Configure the Visual Studio F&O Extension

a. Start Visual Studio 2019 and select ‘Continue without code’ from the welcome screen:

GNavigate to “Extensions -> Dynamics 365 -> Configure runtime -> Configure runtime.”
(1st time configuration path)

Or

Extensions-> Dynamics 365 -> Application Explorer -> Configure

Metadata

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 b. On the configuration form, select ‘New’, then create a new configuration.
• ‘Folder for your metadata’ is the folder where your own code is (or will be)
• ‘Configuration file location’ is a folder (and file name) that will store the configuration
you are creating now. It can be anywhere on your drive
• ‘Cross reference database server’ should be ‘(localdb)\.’ If you are using LocalDB, or
‘localhost’ if you are using SQL Server
• ‘Reference metadata folder’ should contain at least the path where you have the
extracted PackagesLocalDirectory folder from step 5.
You may need to refer View hidden files and folders in Windows - Microsoft Support

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 Note: if after filling all the fields ‘Save’ is still greyed out, you will see error messages in tooltips
with red border on the offending UI controls.
Ensure that you are using the correct string (e.g. ‘(localhost)\.’ If you are using LocalDB). Also, if
you are using LocalDB, you may need to issue the following commands from a command prompt:
‘sqllocaldb create MSSQLLocalDB -s’

Note that you will also get a prompt for elevation as admin to register the protocol handler and
to extract compiler files. Please go ahead and accept.
Once the configuration completes, go to ‘Extensions -> Dynamics 365 -> Application Explorer ->
Open’. If you can see the AOT

Congratulations! You’re now ready to build, deploy, debug and test your X++ modules working
with the online development environment. Explore the possibilities with the power of Finance
and Operations integrated with Power Platform.

Note that you can create several configurations but need to select one to be the current one. After
configuration, it will take effect on new instances of Visual studio.

Try it out!

Feel free to play around, navigate the UX, kick the tires. Ideally, we would like you to perform a remote
deployment as a first task.

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 Need help?
• Please reach out to the Yammer channel with the information from the VS output
pane and the log file as below.
• The log file named VisualStudioD365Extension*.log will be generated at a path similar
to C:\Users<userName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft
Corporation\Microsoft® Visual
Studio®\16.11.32802.440\VisualStudioD365Extension-2022-08-12.log
• Also look at the output pane in Visual Studio.

Deployment logs including DB Sync logs are made available post deployment.

Publishing modules to the Cloud Environment

Any time you do a full build, if you set the configuration to also do a deployment to the
connected environment (see screenshot below), behind the scenes the changes are
packaged up and uploaded to the cloud environment automatically.

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 Publishing Incremental Builds from XPP projects in VS Solution Explorer to the Cloud
Environment
Any time you do an incremental build, if you set the configuration to also do a deployment
to the connected environment (see screenshot below), behind the scenes the changes are
packaged up and uploaded to the cloud environment automatically.

The VS output pane will have details of the deployment to the cloud.

You could also choose to build without deploying and deploy without building (see
screenshots).

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 Deploy a Fully built module separate from the build operation

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 Debugging
As long as VS is configured to reference a cloud environment, when you start the debugging
VS will directly connect to the remote debugger for your cloud environment. For speed up
symbol loading, consider Visual studio symbol setting 'Enable Just My Code' and please
make sure to load only the necessary symbols.

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 If you have a runnable object in your project, you can F5 to get attached, else you can use
the Menu Dynamics 365> Launch Debugger

The experience is typical to regular debugging

Updating the Dataverse solution in the environment

Check Dynamics 365 apps, if update is available for ‘Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Platform
Tools’ and install

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 Feedback worksheet
Instructions:
Please use this worksheet as a helper to keep track of your progress. Once you are done, please go to
https://forms.office.com/r/E3yFEY9qui and enter your feedback.

Time: approximate time in minutes to perform the operation (or to hit the failure point)

Score: a number from 1 to 5 reflecting the quality of your experience, with 1 meaning “very unsatisfied”
and 5 meaning “very satisfied”

Notes: any comment/color on the experience. In case of failure, please detail what failed and at what
stage of the process (alternatively, feel free to post feedback on the Yammer group).
Time Success Score Notes
(Y/N)
Step 1 – Environment provisioning
Step 2 – F&O Metadata install
Step 3 - Visual Studio Extensions
Step 4 – VS F&O Configuration
Step 5 – Connect to Dataverse
Step 6 – First deployment

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