7 min read
Write Skew: The Anomaly Snapshot Isolation Does Not Catch
Two transactions each read what the other writes, both commit, and an invariant dies. Snapshot isolation allows write skew — here is how to close the hole.
Tag
Tutorial
Articles tagged Tutorial on The Augmented Dev.
135 articles
Related series: Power Automate gotchas, F&O and Dataverse integration, X++ performance, Copilot in Dynamics 365
3 min read
Canvas Apps: Concurrent() Is How OnStart Stops Feeling Stuck
Load independent Dataverse and SharePoint calls together in a canvas app, and keep the calls that really do depend on each other out of the same Concurrent.
4 min read
Dataverse Triggers in Power Automate: Select Columns or the Flow Wakes Up for Nothing
How Select columns and Filter rows on a Dataverse trigger cut wasted runs, and the row-version mistakes that make a flow miss the change it was built for.
8 min read
Dual-Write Dropped My Field and Reported Success
Why a dual-write map can complete with zero errors while a custom F&O field never lands in Dataverse — staging tables, unpublished maps, and change tracking after a schema change.
7 min read
OData 429s from F&O: What Actually Throttles You
HTTP 429 from Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations is usually the query shape, not the request count — cross-company scans, $filter that cannot seek, $batch that still burns SQL, and why retrying harder makes month-end worse.
6 min read
Database Replication: Leader-Follower, Quorums, and the Lag Nobody Budgets For
Sync vs async replication, why failover loses writes, and how quorum systems skip the leader entirely. The trade-offs that set your durability story.
5 min read
Sharding a Database: Partition Strategies That Survive Growth
Hash vs range partitioning, choosing a shard key you won't regret, the hot-partition problem, and why cross-shard queries are the real cost of sharding.
5 min read
Designing a Distributed Job Scheduler That Doesn't Fire Twice (Usually)
Delayed jobs, cron at scale, and work claiming with SKIP LOCKED. Why every scheduler promises at-least-once and what that forces on your handlers.
5 min read
Designing a News Feed: Fan-Out on Write vs Fan-Out on Read
Precompute every follower's timeline or assemble it per request? The celebrity edge case that breaks the pretty answer, and the hybrid everyone ships.
5 min read
Designing a Payment System: Double-Entry Ledgers and Idempotent Money
Why 'UPDATE balance' is a bug, how double-entry bookkeeping becomes a schema, and the idempotency and reconciliation machinery that keeps money honest.
5 min read
Distributed ID Generation: Snowflake, ULID, and the Clock-Skew Problem
Why auto-increment dies when you shard, why random UUIDs wreck index locality, and how time-ordered IDs like Snowflake and UUIDv7 thread the needle.
5 min read
Distributed Locks: Leases, Fencing Tokens, and Why Redlock Is Controversial
A lock with a TTL can expire while its holder still thinks it owns it. Fencing tokens fix what timeouts break — and most lock problems have better answers.
5 min read
Geospatial Indexing: How 'Drivers Near Me' Actually Works
B-trees can't answer 2D questions. Geohash, quadtrees, and hex grids turn 'within 2km' into a prefix scan — plus the boundary problem that trips everyone.
5 min read
Load Shedding and Graceful Degradation: Failing the Right Requests First
Overloaded systems don't slow down gracefully — goodput collapses. Admission control, criticality tiers, and retry budgets decide what breaks and what survives.
6 min read
Raft in Plain English: How Clusters Agree When Nodes Keep Dying
Leader election, log replication, and the quorum-overlap trick that makes Raft safe. What etcd, Consul, and Kafka KRaft are actually doing under the hood.
4 min read
Feature Management in D365 Finance and Operations: Flags, States, and Custom Features
How the D365 F&O Feature management workspace works, what feature states mean for ALM, and how to ship your own X++ features behind flags.
4 min read
Retry Policies in Power Automate: What Actually Happens When an Action Fails
How Power Automate retry policies work, which errors they cover, how to configure them, and how to keep retries from duplicating side effects.
4 min read
The Transactional Outbox Pattern: Publishing Events Without Losing Them
Why dual writes lose events, how the transactional outbox pattern fixes it, and the relay, ordering, and cleanup decisions that make it production-ready.
7 min read
Feature Flags: How to Stop Coupling Deployment to Release
Shipping code and releasing a feature are different events that most teams accidentally fuse together. Feature flags split them — and unlock trunk-based development, safe rollouts, and instant rollback.
7 min read
Evaluating LLM Applications: Getting Past 'It Looks Good to Me'
Shipping LLM features on vibes works until a prompt tweak silently breaks ten other cases. Here is how to build evals that catch regressions before your users do.
7 min read
Getting Structured Output From an LLM Without the Heartbreak
Asking a model to 'return JSON' and parsing the result is how you get 3 a.m. pages. Tool schemas, constrained decoding, and validation turn a probabilistic text generator into a reliable API.
7 min read
D365 F&O Data Entities: Composite, Computed, and Virtual Fields Explained
Data entities look like simple tables until you need a nested import, a derived column, or a field with no storage. Knowing the three advanced shapes is what makes integrations actually work.
7 min read
Chunking Strategies for RAG: Where Retrieval Quality Is Won or Lost
Most RAG systems that retrieve bad context aren't failing at embeddings or reranking — they're failing at chunking. How you split documents quietly decides what your model can ever find.
7 min read
Backpressure: What Happens When Your System Can't Keep Up
A fast producer and a slow consumer is a recipe for an out-of-memory crash. Backpressure is the discipline of letting the slow part tell the fast part to wait. Here is how to design it in.
6 min read
Database Connection Pooling: The Bottleneck You Forgot to Tune
More connections is not more throughput. Past a point, adding connections makes your database slower. Here is how pools actually work and how to size one without guessing.
6 min read
Power Apps Collections vs. Dataverse: Where Your App's Data Should Actually Live
Collections feel fast and convenient, so makers overuse them — and ship apps that lose data and break on refresh. Here is when to hold data in memory and when it belongs in Dataverse.
7 min read
Write-Ahead Logging: The Unsung Hero of Database Durability
How does a database survive a power cut mid-write without corrupting your data? The answer is a deceptively simple rule: log the change before you apply it. Here is why WAL is everywhere.
6 min read
Bloom Filters: Saving Gigabytes When 'Probably Not' Is Good Enough
A Bloom filter answers 'have I seen this?' using a tiny fraction of the memory a real set would need. The price is false positives — and understanding that trade is the whole skill.
7 min read
Resilient Power Automate: Retry Policies and Dead-Letter Patterns
Transient failures are normal in any flow that calls an API. The difference between a flow that self-heals and one that pages you at 2 a.m. is how you handle retries and the failures that stick.
6 min read
The Saga Pattern: Transactions That Span Services You Can't Roll Back
A single ACID transaction can't span order, payment, and inventory services. Sagas chain local transactions with compensating actions to keep distributed state consistent — eventually.
5 min read
Extending Data Entities in D365 Finance & Operations Without Breaking Upgrades
Add fields, computed columns, and validation to standard D365 Finance & Operations data entities the upgrade-safe way — with X++ examples and the staging-table traps to avoid.
6 min read
Optimistic UI Updates: Making Apps Feel Instant Without Lying to Users
The like button that responds before the server confirms feels instant. The trick is updating the UI first and reconciling later — and handling the rollback so you never mislead the user.
4 min read
Chain of Command vs Event Handlers: Extending D365 F&O the Right Way
When to use Chain of Command and when to use pre/post event handlers in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations — with X++ examples, a decision table, and the gotchas that trip up teams.
6 min read
Circuit Breakers: Stopping a Cascading Failure Before It Spreads
When a downstream service slows down, naive retries turn one sick dependency into a system-wide outage. A circuit breaker fails fast, sheds load, and gives the dependency room to recover.
7 min read
Dataverse Plug-in Performance: Avoiding the Slow Plug-in That Times Out
A synchronous plug-in runs inside the user's transaction with a hard time limit. One slow query or external call can break saves for everyone. Here is how to keep plug-ins fast and safe.
4 min read
Electronic Reporting in D365 Finance: Building Custom Formats Without Code
A practical guide to the Electronic Reporting (ER) framework in D365 Finance — data models, model mappings, and format configurations to produce custom files without X++.
6 min read
The Transactional Outbox: Reliable Messaging Without Distributed Transactions
You wrote to the database and then published an event — and the publish failed. Now your systems disagree. The outbox pattern makes the write and the event atomic without a two-phase commit.
7 min read
Debouncing and Throttling in React: Taming Expensive Event Handlers
A search box that fires a request on every keystroke, a scroll handler running 60 times a second — these are debounce and throttle problems. The concepts are simple; React makes them subtly tricky.
4 min read
Financial Dimensions in D365 Finance: How They Really Work
Default dimensions, ledger dimensions, account structures, and the DimensionAttributeValueCombination table explained — with X++ patterns for reading and building dimensions in D365 Finance.
7 min read
Consistent Hashing: How Distributed Systems Avoid the Great Reshuffle
When you add a node to a sharded cache, naive hashing remaps almost every key. Consistent hashing moves only a fraction. Here is the mechanism, the virtual-node fix, and the traps.
6 min read
Dataverse Many-to-Many Relationships: Native, Manual, and When to Use Each
Native N:N relationships are quick to set up and impossible to extend. A manual junction table is more work and far more flexible. Choosing wrong means a painful migration later.
4 min read
Number Sequences in D365 Finance & Operations: Setup, Pitfalls, and X++ Patterns
How the number sequence framework works in D365 Finance & Operations — continuous vs non-continuous, preallocation, cleanup, and X++ patterns for generating numbers on custom tables.
4 min read
D365 Finance & Operations Security: Roles, Duties, and Privileges Done Right
How the role-based security model in D365 Finance & Operations actually works — privileges, duties, roles, segregation of duties, and how to extend security without overlayering.
4 min read
Recurring Integrations and the REST API in D365 Finance & Operations
Move files in and out of D365 Finance & Operations reliably using the recurring integrations REST API — enqueue, dequeue, acknowledge, and the status polling patterns that keep data flowing.
4 min read
Extensible Data Security (XDS) in D365 Finance & Operations: Row-Level Security That Scales
How to build extensible data security policies in D365 Finance & Operations to filter records by user context — with a worked example, query constructs, and the performance pitfalls to avoid.
7 min read
Managing D365 Finance & Operations Environments with LCS and Database Refreshes
Practical D365 Finance and Operations LCS guide for environment tiers, database refreshes, bacpac exports, restores, and sandbox governance.
6 min read
Table and Form Data Source Events in D365 F&O: A Practical X++ Reference
Practical D365 F&O X++ event handler guide for table CRUD events, form data source events, ordering caveats, and when to use CoC.
6 min read
Building and Deploying D365 Finance & Operations Packages with Azure DevOps
Build and deploy D365 Finance and Operations packages with Azure DevOps, hosted build pipelines, LCS Asset Library, and release safeguards.
6 min read
Surviving OData Throttling in D365 Finance & Operations Integrations
Design resilient D365 Finance and Operations OData integrations with 429 handling, Retry-After, batching, backoff, jitter, and DMF fallbacks.
6 min read
Building Custom Workflows in D365 Finance & Operations from Scratch
Step-by-step D365 Finance and Operations workflow framework guide covering categories, types, approvals, event handlers, and submit code.
5 min read
TempDB vs InMemory Temporary Tables in X++: When to Use Which
Clear X++ guide to TempDB vs InMemory temporary tables in D365 F&O, with joins, indexes, set-based operations, and performance tradeoffs.
7 min read
Dual-Write vs Virtual Entities vs OData: Choosing the Right F&O–Dataverse Pattern
Compare dual-write, virtual entities, OData, and DMF for Finance and Operations to Dataverse integration with latency and failure tradeoffs.
6 min read
Low-Code Plug-ins in Dataverse: Server-Side Logic Without C#
Learn when to use Dataverse low-code plug-ins with Power Fx for transactional server-side logic, and when C# plug-ins or flows still win.
6 min read
Writing Your First Dataverse Plug-in in C#: A Complete Walkthrough
Build a first Dataverse C# plug-in with IPlugin, pipeline stages, Target handling, tracing, registration, and production-safe practices.
6 min read
Business Rules vs Power Fx vs Plug-ins: Where to Put Dataverse Logic
A practical Dataverse logic placement guide comparing business rules, Power Fx, JavaScript form scripts, and C# plug-ins for scale.
6 min read
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: What It Does and How to Configure It
Configure Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales with practical guidance on summaries, email drafting, meeting prep, data readiness, and governance.
6 min read
Model-Driven App Forms: Customization Patterns That Scale
Design scalable model-driven app forms with tabs, sections, quick views, business rules, form scripts, security, and performance patterns.
6 min read
Alternate Keys and Upsert in Dataverse: Reliable Integrations Without Duplicates
Use Dataverse alternate keys and Web API upsert to build idempotent integrations that match business identifiers, avoid duplicates, and simplify retries.
6 min read
Calculated and Rollup Columns in Dataverse: Patterns and Limits
Compare Dataverse calculated, rollup, and formula columns with practical examples, platform limits, timing tradeoffs, and when plug-ins are safer.
6 min read
Securing Power Pages with Dataverse Table Permissions and Web Roles
Secure Power Pages data with Dataverse table permissions, access scopes, web roles, column profiles, and testing practices that prevent data leaks.
7 min read
Configuring SLAs and Entitlements in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Configure Dynamics 365 Customer Service SLAs, KPI timers, business hours, pause rules, Power Automate actions, and entitlements without surprises.
6 min read
Querying the Dataverse Web API: FetchXML, OData, and When to Use Each
Choose OData or FetchXML for Dataverse Web API queries with practical examples for select, filter, joins, aggregation, paging, and performance.
7 min read
Canvas vs Model-Driven vs Power Pages: Choosing the Right Power Apps Type
Choose between canvas apps, model-driven apps, and Power Pages using a practical matrix for UX, data, licensing, governance, and audience fit.
6 min read
Solving Power Apps Delegation Warnings for Large Dataverse Tables
Learn how Power Apps delegation works, why blue warnings matter, and the Dataverse patterns that keep large-table queries accurate and fast.
5 min read
Building Your First PCF Control for Power Apps
Build a first Power Apps PCF control with the CLI, manifest, TypeScript lifecycle, local testing, solution packaging, and safe deployment steps.
5 min read
Building Offline-Capable Power Apps for the Field
Design offline-capable Power Apps for field teams using canvas app caching, queue-and-sync patterns, conflict handling, and mobile offline profiles.
5 min read
Named Formulas and the With() Function: Power Fx Patterns for Faster Apps
Use Power Fx named formulas and With to replace noisy OnStart logic, reduce repeated lookups, and make canvas apps faster and easier to maintain.
6 min read
Power Platform Environment Strategy: Dev, Test, Prod, and Everything Between
Design a Power Platform environment strategy with dev, test, prod, managed solutions, pipelines, DLP, routing, and governance that scales for teams.
6 min read
Data Loss Prevention Policies in Power Platform: A Practical Setup Guide
Practical guide to Power Platform DLP policies, connector groups, environment scope, custom connectors, endpoint rules, and flow breakage diagnosis.
6 min read
Managed Environments in Power Platform: What They Are and When to Turn Them On
Understand Managed Environments in Power Platform, including governance features, licensing, security controls, insights, trade-offs, and rollout timing.
6 min read
Building Your First Agent in Copilot Studio
Build a first Copilot Studio agent with topics, generative answers, actions, authentication, testing, publishing, and Teams or website channels.
6 min read
Embedding Power BI in Power Apps and Driving Cross-Filtering
Embed Power BI content in canvas apps, pass app selections into report filters, read Power BI selections back, and handle licensing and performance.
6 min read
Responsive Canvas Apps with Containers: Stop Using Absolute Positioning
Learn responsive canvas app layout with horizontal and vertical containers, flexible sizing, breakpoints, scaling settings, accessibility, and tab order.
5 min read
15 Power Automate Expressions Every Maker Should Memorize
Memorize these Power Automate expressions to build faster flows, handle nulls, shape arrays, format dates, reduce action count, and debug WDL.
5 min read
Calling the Dataverse Web API from Power Automate with the HTTP Action
Learn when to call the Dataverse Web API from Power Automate for actions, functions, batch requests, impersonation, row association, and binds.
5 min read
Child Flows in Power Automate: Reuse, Pass Data, and Avoid Duplication
Use child flows in Power Automate to centralize reusable logic, pass typed inputs and outputs, handle errors, reduce duplication, and improve ALM.
5 min read
Speeding Up Apply to Each: Concurrency, Filters, and Select in Power Automate
Speed up Power Automate Apply to each loops with concurrency, Filter array, Select, OData filters, pagination strategy, lower action counts, and safer runs.
5 min read
Mastering Parse JSON in Power Automate: Schemas, Null Handling, and Arrays
Master Power Automate Parse JSON with generated schemas, nullable fields, required properties, arrays, nested access, and practical error fixes.
6 min read
Getting Started with Power Automate Desktop: Your First RPA Bot
Build your first Power Automate Desktop RPA bot with selectors, variables, loops, Excel data, cloud triggers, licensing, and reliable handoffs.
5 min read
Trigger Conditions in Power Automate: Stop Flows From Running When They Should Not
Use Power Automate trigger conditions to prevent noisy runs, save quota, filter SharePoint changes, skip system updates, and debug triggers.
6 min read
Try-Catch-Finally in Power Automate with Scopes and Run After
Implement try-catch-finally error handling in Power Automate using Scopes, run-after settings, result outputs, retries, alerts, and Terminate.
6 min read
Batch Create and Update SharePoint Items in Power Automate with the $batch API
Speed up bulk SharePoint creates and updates in Power Automate by calling the $batch API with changesets, chunking, and per-item error handling.
6 min read
Posting Interactive Adaptive Cards to Teams from Power Automate
Create Teams adaptive cards from Power Automate, collect inputs, capture responders, update cards, validate replies, and choose cards wisely.
6 min read
Connection References and Environment Variables: Power Automate ALM Essentials
Use connection references and environment variables to make Power Automate solution deployments predictable across dev, test, and production.
6 min read
Handling Pagination and Large Datasets in Power Automate
Learn how Power Automate pagination, thresholds, filters, and batching keep large Dataverse and SharePoint datasets reliable.
6 min read
Securing Secrets in Power Automate: Secure Inputs, Outputs, and Key Vault
Secure Power Automate secrets with Azure Key Vault, secure inputs and outputs, least privilege, rotation, and safer ALM patterns.
10 min read
An MCP Server for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations: Natural-Language Access to ERP
How to expose Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations to Claude through MCP — the architecture, the data entity choices, the auth model, and the operations that should never be one prompt away.
8 min read
Event-Driven System Design: The Decisions That Bite You Later
A practical guide to the design decisions that determine whether an event-driven system stays maintainable or quietly rots — delivery guarantees, ordering, idempotency, schema evolution, and the outbox.
5 min read
Power Automate and Azure Service Bus: Reliable Enterprise Messaging
Build resilient Power Automate integrations with Azure Service Bus queues, topics, sessions, duplicate detection, and dead-letter handling.
6 min read
MCP Explained: How Claude Connects to Your Dataverse Data
An introduction to the Model Context Protocol and how the Dataverse MCP server lets Claude read and write business data through natural language.
6 min read
Querying Dataverse from Claude: A Practical MCP Walkthrough
A hands-on example of using the Dataverse MCP server with Claude to query tables, create records, and update data in Dynamics 365 through natural language.
6 min read
Claude Code Hooks: Automating Repo Guardrails Without Pre-Commit Fatigue
Use Claude Code hooks to enforce policy at the moment actions happen — before edits, before tool calls, on session start — without relying on pre-commit hooks everyone learns to bypass.
7 min read
Building Your First MCP Server in Python: A Hands-On Walkthrough
From zero to a working Model Context Protocol server in about 100 lines — tools, resources, a local client test, and the traps that will bite you on day one.
7 min read
Prompt Caching with Claude: What It Saves, Where It Fails, and How to Set It Up in Production
A precise look at Claude's prompt caching — how the cache hit math actually works, the 5-minute and 1-hour TTL variants, and the subtle mistakes that silently disable it.
12 min read
Snowflake Security in Layers: Roles, Column Masking, Row Policies, and Environment Controls
A practical walkthrough of Snowflake's four security layers — role hierarchy, column-level masking policies, row access policies, and environment isolation — with real SQL examples.
8 min read
Tool Use with Claude: Parallel Calls, Retries, and the Patterns That Survive Production
The tool-use features of the Claude API look straightforward in the docs. These are the production patterns that separate a demo from a system that handles real traffic — parallel tool calls, retry loops, error recovery, and tool_choice tactics.
7 min read
Claude Agent SDK vs Direct API: When to Reach for Each
The Claude Agent SDK is the fastest path to a capable coding-style agent. The raw messages API is the fastest path to understanding what your agent is doing. Here's when each is the right tool.
5 min read
Next.js 16 and React 19: What Actually Matters in 2026
A practical guide to the features that changed how we build React apps — Server Components, the new compiler, and the patterns that stuck.
8 min read
Vector Databases Compared: pgvector, Qdrant, Pinecone, and When You Don't Need Any
A practical comparison of the vector databases people actually deploy in 2026 — and an honest look at when a vector database is the wrong tool for the job.
8 min read
Idempotency Keys: The Pattern That Saves Your Payment System
Idempotency keys are what separate a payment system that double-charges during a retry from one that doesn't. The mechanism looks simple and has five subtle failure modes you need to know about.
8 min read
Multi-Tenant Data Isolation: Row-Level, Schema-Level, Database-Level, and How to Choose
Three patterns for multi-tenant data isolation in SaaS, the trade-offs between cost, blast radius, and compliance, and a migration path from one to another when you outgrow your first choice.
8 min read
Building Custom Copilot Plugins for D365 Sales: Your First Action Step by Step
A hands-on tutorial for creating custom Copilot plugins in Dynamics 365 Sales — from defining a custom API to registering a plugin that Copilot can invoke, with real examples and permission gotchas.
9 min read
Autonomous AI Agents in D365 Sales and Customer Service: What You Actually Need to Know
A practical breakdown of the Sales Qualification Agent, Case Management Agent, and the governance framework you need before deploying them.
8 min read
Building a Real-Time Dashboard with Next.js, Server-Sent Events, and Supabase
A step-by-step guide to building a live-updating dashboard using Next.js API routes, Server-Sent Events, and Supabase Realtime — with reconnection handling and smooth UI transitions.
8 min read
The New Accounting Rules Engine in D365 Finance: Stop Wasting 30 Hours a Month on Period Close
How the Accounting Rules Engine, multi-entity journals, flexible hierarchies, and Copilot in D365 Finance 10.0.46+ transform period close for multi-company environments.
8 min read
Automated Testing for Power Apps with Test Engine — A Practical Walkthrough
Set up automated tests for your canvas apps using Power Apps Test Engine — from first test case to CI/CD pipeline integration.
9 min read
Dual-Write Between D365 F&O and Dataverse: Pitfalls and Patterns That Actually Work
A field-tested guide to dual-write configuration between D365 Finance & Operations and Dataverse — covering initial sync failures, conflict resolution, performance tuning, and when to use alternatives like virtual entities or data export service.
9 min read
Monitoring What Matters: Setting Up Alerts That Don't Cry Wolf
Most alerting setups produce noise that teams learn to ignore. Here is how to design alerts around the four golden signals, set thresholds that mean something, and build a system where every alert is worth waking someone up for.
8 min read
Azure Functions vs Azure Container Apps: Choosing the Right Serverless Model
A detailed comparison of Azure Functions and Azure Container Apps — pricing, cold starts, scaling, runtime support, and a decision flowchart for picking the right one.
6 min read
Building a Zero-Downtime Deployment Pipeline with Azure DevOps and Slot Swaps
How to build a deployment pipeline that swaps staging and production slots on Azure App Service — with smoke tests, warm-up, rollback strategy, and a real YAML pipeline you can steal.
7 min read
Infrastructure as Code with Bicep: Moving Beyond ARM Templates
ARM templates are painful. Bicep fixes the developer experience with cleaner syntax, modules, and first-class Azure CLI integration. Here is how to migrate and start using it in your CI/CD pipelines.
9 min read
Rate Limiting and Throttling: Designing APIs That Survive Traffic Spikes
Why every public API needs rate limiting, the four main algorithms compared, implementation in Next.js with Redis, proper HTTP headers, and Azure API Management policies.
9 min read
Authentication Patterns for Modern Web Apps: Sessions, JWTs, and OAuth Compared
A practical comparison of session-based auth, JWT auth, and OAuth 2.0 / OIDC — how each works, when to use them, security pitfalls, and recommended patterns for SPAs, server apps, and mobile.
7 min read
CQRS in Practice: When It's Worth the Complexity and When It Isn't
A clear-eyed look at Command Query Responsibility Segregation — what it actually is, how to implement it in .NET, when it pays off, and when it's unnecessary complexity.
10 min read
X++ Query Performance in D365 F&O: Indexes, Joins, and the Trace Parser
How to diagnose and fix slow X++ queries in D365 Finance & Operations using Trace Parser, LCS SQL insights, execution plans, proper index design, join selection, and set-based operations.
9 min read
Virtual Entities in D365 F&O: Exposing External Data Without the ETL Tax
How to use virtual entities in D365 Finance & Operations to surface external data from APIs and databases without importing, syncing, or paying the ETL tax — with a real-world supplier data example.
6 min read
PowerShell Modules: Packaging and Publishing Reusable Scripts for Your Team
Stop copying .ps1 files into shared folders. Learn how to package PowerShell scripts into proper modules with versioning, publish them to a private feed, and distribute them to your team like a professional.
10 min read
Migrating Data into D365 F&O with the Data Management Framework — Lessons from the Trenches
A practical guide to data migration using the Data Management Framework in D365 Finance & Operations — covering entity selection, staging tables, transformation patterns, error handling, and performance tuning from real enterprise migrations.
8 min read
Canvas App Performance: 10 Patterns That Actually Make a Difference
Concrete, measurable patterns to speed up slow Power Apps canvas apps — with before/after examples for each optimization.
7 min read
Power Fx Formulas Every Maker Should Know in 2026
Advanced Power Fx patterns that separate beginners from power users — With, Sequence, ParseJSON, error handling, regex, and more.
9 min read
Power Automate + D365 F&O End-to-End: Consuming Business Events and Calling Data Entities
Build a full round-trip integration between Power Automate and D365 Finance & Operations — trigger on business events, transform data, and write back via OData.
9 min read
Chain of Responsibility in D365 F&O: Extending Standard Logic Without Overlayering
How to use Chain of Responsibility (CoR) to extend standard X++ classes in D365 Finance & Operations — with code samples for wrapping methods, accessing protected members, and avoiding common pitfalls.
11 min read
Business Events and Data Events in D365 Finance & Operations: A Developer Guide
How to build, activate, and consume Business Events and Data Events in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations with X++ code samples and integration patterns.
9 min read
Dataverse Security Roles: A Practical Guide to Getting Them Right
How Dataverse security roles actually work, common mistakes that leave data exposed, and the layered model you should be using in 2026.
9 min read
SysOperation Framework in D365 F&O: Building Batch Jobs the Right Way
How to build batch jobs using the SysOperation framework in D365 Finance & Operations — contract, controller, and service classes with X++ code samples.
7 min read
Building a Multi-Step Approval Workflow with Adaptive Cards in Power Automate
Go beyond basic approvals — build a multi-level approval chain with rich Adaptive Cards, timeout handling, escalation logic, and full audit trails in Power Automate.
8 min read
Custom Connectors in Power Automate: Integrating Any API Without Writing Code
Build a custom connector from an OpenAPI spec, configure authentication, handle pagination, and share it across your organization — step by step.
4 min read
Advanced Error Handling in Power Automate Cloud Flows
Build resilient flows with scope-based try-catch-finally patterns, configure run after, and structured error logging in 2026.
3 min read
Fixing NuGet Error: Unable to Load the Service Index for Source
A step-by-step guide to diagnosing and resolving NuGet package source errors in Visual Studio and dotnet CLI.
2 min read
Handling Null and Blank Date Fields in Power Automate
Reliable techniques for detecting empty date fields in Dataverse and SharePoint connectors within Power Automate flows — including Filter rows, Excel serial dates, and the 0001-01-01 sentinel.
3 min read
Managing Environment Variables Across Dev, Test, and Prod in Power Platform
How to use environment variables, connection references, and solution-aware configuration for clean ALM in Power Platform.
3 min read
Detecting Create vs Update Triggers in Dataverse Power Automate Flows
How to distinguish between create and update operations in Dataverse-triggered flows, filter Change type at the trigger, and handle the missing pre-image problem.
3 min read
Remove Duplicates From Arrays in Power Automate — 3 Approaches
Three practical techniques for deduplicating array data in Power Automate, from union() on scalars to key-based object dedupe — and when to leave the flow entirely.
3 min read
Eliminating Null Reference Errors in Power Automate Flows
Practical expressions and defensive patterns to prevent null field errors from crashing your Power Automate flows at runtime — including trigger conditions and Select columns.
3 min read
Fixing 'PowerShell Script Not Digitally Signed' — The Right Way
How to resolve execution policy errors when running .ps1 scripts, and why you should care about script signing in 2026.