What's wrong with my D365 F&O development setup and how do typical developers work?

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Posted on by Wmyk

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I'm a seasoned AX developer that's behind in D365 F&O and I'm trying to learn on some private projects and I'm running into issues I find hard to believe that other developers just deal with.

I downloaded the latest VHD from LCS, created an Azure App Registration, generated self-cert, downloaded and applied updates (runbook), and it is hosted on my HyperV with 10 cores, 30GB+ memory, and fast NVMe SSDs.

How do developers normally write code for D365 F&O? Is it on the OneBox VHD, directly on an LCS/ARM deployed D365 F&O Azure VM, or something else?
When I create any application in VS and run it (`F5`), Edge prompts me for my O365 username/password & 2FA prompt. EVERY execution! It won't save my credentials because it's launching some sort of "fresh" Edge instance. Am I doing something wrong here? I can't imagine every developer deals with that...should I have the VM domain joined?
Incredibly slow development process?! I think I have a well-resourced VM but everything seems slow. Making 1 small change to code to a "Hello World" app can still take 60+ seconds to run. In AX, I'll sometimes use a job to tinker with `subString`, bitwise operations, or other little things, but that style of development seems impossible with this slowness?
Intellisense doesn't seem to work/refresh all the time? Is this the case for anyone else? How am I supposed to dev when Intellisense and the compiler are basically suggesting to me that I have a code mistake....but in reality it's just Intellisense not working?

Everything is just such a long process, it seems like developers must be doing something differently than me.

This biggest issue I have is the sheer time it takes to do some basic operations. I'm concerned my AX customers looking to upgrade will recoil at the increase in time for enhancements.

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André Arnaud de Cal... 300,904 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi Wmyk,

The HyperV looks good, but can you tell if this is the configuration of your hardware or what has been allocated to the VM? Is the OS and the VHD on physical different SSDs?

I will try to answer your questions.

1. This is different per organization. It would be your decision to run a local VM or a cloud hosted VM. At my company, almost all of the development and build instances are running in the cloud.

2. Have you tried open Edge directly instead of starting it via Visual Studio?

3. The same question as I have on your question 2. Have you opened Edge directly? Also note that after a build, some caching needs to be rebuilt.

4. Intellisense is indeed not perfect. Can you provide an example from your experience?

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Wmyk 152 on at

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My workstation/Hyper-V's OS is on one SSD and the VM is located on a physically dedicated SSD. The VM's OS seems snappy, but Visual Studio is what can seem to freeze on seemingly innocuous operations...like right clicking on things? I think after applying updates and doing a full environment build + DB sync that resolved some issues. Great info too btw, thank you!

When you say cloud hosted VM, you are referring to the LCS deployed I'm assuming and not actually uploading the OneBox VHD and hosting that way...correct?

I do this as well when I'm just using the D365 environment and poking around, but not when I'm testing code.

I wasn't exactly sure how/when things were reflected in the "live" browser. I thought I might have to do `Dynamics 365>Build models` for it to show up there.

Intellisense - On the vanilla 10.0.24 VM, I created an X++ project with a C# class library and added the reference to the X++ project. From an X++ class, when doing "using MyDotNetClass;", it wouldn't complete. I cleaned the solution and rebuilt with no luck. I typed it anyway and built and it worked, but the intellisense never worked. Likewise, calling the static methods from X++ didn't have intellisense. I restarted and things with no luck. I decided to apply updates and do a full model build & sync after and it seems to be working better.

What are the caches you're referring to in #3? I think that might help with a lot of the performance issues. Is it just a matter of performing a project/solution build and it's updated in the browser? Or what is the extra cache?

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Wmyk 152 on at

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Also for your #2/#3, how do I debug using that method?

It seems the only way to debug a session is pressing F5, logging in w/2FA, etc. to hit the breakpoint.

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ergun sahin 8,826 Moderator on at

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If you have set breakpoint and debug mode is on, it doesn't matter where you do the UI side operation. Even if someone else does it, if the code goes through your breakpoint, it will fall into debug.

In short, if you keep a window open with user and password information, you can do the transactions here.

You can open the debug with the attach method outside of F5.

dynamics365musings.com/.../

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Martin Dráb 237,795 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I think that point two might be caused by a wrong value of OfflineAuthenticationAdminEmail in DynamicsDevConfig.xml.

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Wmyk 152 on at

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I changed the email to my own and also used the d365fo powershell to confirm I did it correctly, restarted, and it's still prompting me for login every time. It was previously incorrect though, but no luck unfortunately.

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Martin Dráb 237,795 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Did you run admin provisioning tool?

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Wmyk 152 on at

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I did, but there are a ton of little problems with that VHD. I noticed MS released a new one (10.0.29) a few days ago and with that one, the problem went away.

In my 30 minutes of using the new VM, I've noticed they fixed several annoyances too. I don't need to "slmgr -rearm", the version of Office doesn't require a key, they fixed the fake ACS thumbprint in the registry, and a couple other things I've noticed so far.

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