Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

How to deploy first development/demo environment for Dynamics 365 Business Central as a Microsoft Partner?

Hello,

This is my first post in the Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC) forum. I'm interested in learning the functional and technical side of D365BC. I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction.

Background Info:

I'm an independent software developer currently working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365FO). I've been working with that product since it was known as Axapta 3.0. My company is registered in the Microsoft Partner Network (now known as Microsoft Cloud Partner Program), and my company has signed the Microsoft Partner Registration Agreement (PRA) which allows partners to access resources for various Dynamics products such as Dynamics AX, D365FO, Dynamics NAV, and D365BC.

What I'm trying to do:

My immediate goal is to spin up both a locally hosted development environment (VM) and a cloud hosted development environment (Azure) for learning D365BC.

I have access to Microsoft Lifecycle Services (LCS) which I use currently for Dynamics AX 2012 and D365FO. As expected, my LCS account also provides access to NAV resources, but for some unknown reason, D365BC is not present as one of the products available there (although I believe it should be available because it was included in my company's PRA).

Are D365BC partner resources (e.g. demo/development environments) managed through LCS, or is there a completely separate infrastructure for D365BC? I was under the impression that I should be able to create development projects in LCS for D365BC like I can for other Dynamics products. For example, I'm able to download D365FO "OneBox" development VMs from LCS, and I'm also able to deploy a cloud based D365FO demo/development environment to Azure from LCS.

If D365BC development environments are managed outside of LCS for Microsoft Partners, please let me know where I can register to access them for learning purposes. So far, I've found this for D365BC:

I think #1 is what I might need for spinning up a D365BC environment for learning the technical/development side of D365BC. I've already signed up for #2, but I get the impression that Customer Digital Experiences (CDX) is mostly for demo purposes. The Terms of Service (TOS) for CDX seems to allow demo and learning, but some of the language indicated that it's not ok to use CDX for development purposes. So I could probably use CDX to learn the functional side of D365BC, but I don't believe I could do any development work there (even if it was just learning to do development work).

Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Categories:

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Welcome to the Business Central community.

For creating your online sandbox you should go to demos.microsoft.com and log in with the credentials you use when you log on to the Microsoft Partner Center.

For your local dev environment I recommend that you use Docker for those. And there is a tool called BcContainerHelper that helps you create your Docker container and you can get going with development.

Freddy has an excellent technical blog that you can start looking at

freddysblog.com/.../

Most of the BC resources are publicly available you will get a great view of the available resources if you go to https://aka.ms/bcall

You can also purchase your own partner sandbox if you want that at some point.

Check out these resources and circle back with more detailed questions.

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