Dynamics 365 F&O Development Beginners Guide

This article is part of a series that I will be doing for beginners to gain a preliminary understanding of how to do development for dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. 

To get started we need a development environment. The following video posted by Microsoft will give you all the required information for setting up your development environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqp9MetfiyM

It is important to note that your Visual Studio instance is always in admin mode while developing.

When we are inside the visual studio development studio we can see a new  'Dynamics 365' file menu. Note in Visual Studio 2019, the Dynamics 365 Menu is inside the 'Extensions' file menu. Everything that we require for our development purposes can be found here. 

For this demonstration I am using Visual Studio 2019.

The Dynamics 365 Menu has the following menu items. 


The following section described each menu item. I will only be discussing on the menu items that are required for a beginner to get started. 
  • Deploy 
    • Create Deployable Package
      This menu item allows users to be able to manually create a deployable package which will contain all the models that are required for packaging and deployment to an environment.
      Microsoft recommends to always generate a deployable package through an automated pipeline for application to any LCS environments. 
  • Model Management
    • Create model
      Users can create a model and also specify which other models you want your newly created model to reference to.
      More details:
      Models and packages
    • Refresh models
      This feature will ensure all changes to your model has been loaded successfully within the visual studio instance.
    • Update model parameters
      Allows users to be able to update the model parameters and/or update the model referencing

  • Import Project
    This allows you to be able to import an existing F&O Visual Studio solution into the current Visual Studio instance
  • Build models
    Contains the list of models that can be compiled within the development environment.


  • Synchronize database
    Allows all data models to be automatically synchronized against the development environment SQL database.

  • Find labels
    You can search for any label within all the models already deployed to the current environment. Label are wordings that we see in the front end of the development environment. 
Application Explorer
This allows accessibility to all the elements within the models that have been deployed to the current development environment

The application explorer is located under the View file menu.

Each node in this tree represents a model. A model represents functionalities or features that are accessible to F&O.
Application Suite, Application Foundation and Application Platform are the core models that should always be referenced on any custom model.

Every model has the following nodes accessible. All elements within a model can be viewed within this list. 


You can also right click on AOT and switch to class view which will list all the elements as shown below.



In the next article I will be describing how we can create a simple form in D365 F&O

More details

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