Having had a first week of general introduction into Business Central performed by Rob Gabriels, 4 out of 9 students returned after the weekend to Hotel Mooi Veluwe in Putten, Netherlands. They were to join their next trainer, Luc van Vugt, for the technical track of our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Junior Training. In this week they would get their introduction into AL Development. At least 3 out of 4 as one of them already started to work with AL development at ABC E Business a year ago.
BTW: this years junior developers group was made up of two guys coming from Cegeka-DSA (Veenendaal), and two from ABC E Business (Eindhoven).
technical track
On Monday the lot was introduced to the technical background of Business Central and got to work on various hands-on exercises:
- The 3-tier architecture
- VS Code
- The AL language
- The application objects table and page
- Code snippets
It showed to be quite a challenging day for the three freshmen to get understand the various concepts, where it was a kind of comfortable day the one more experienced even though he did learn some new things also.
Per almost a tradition, after our daily quiz and review of pervious day’s homework, Tuesday morning was spent on data access coding. After a comprehensive but also quick introduction by the trainer, the students got to work on a couple of exemplary coding assignments. Having reviewed the resulting code and discussing a couple of alternatives, in the afternoon the first case of this course was handed over: the Course Registration case. Building again a number of tables and pages form scratch helped the students to get a deeper understanding of the basics of what technically makes Business Central the database application it is: tables, fields, FlowFields, pages, sub pages, etc.
On Wednesday, again after the quiz and review of pervious day’s homework, the concept of field and table triggers was introduced: how to get business logic implemented on a table and its fields that cannot be achieved by means of so-called properties? The Course Registration case was extended accordingly and from here the bridge was taken to events: how to extend standard objects by means of subscribers and how to make your own code extensible by means of integration/business events.
Thursday was dedicated to a new case with a more high level requirement description, Support Registration, enabling the students to internalize the so far learned concepts and skills even more. And at the same including a couple of new challenges like learning how to solve things by looking at the standard application. At the end of the afternoon they could witness the final demos performed by the juniors at TecMan that concluded their Opgona Junior Training the week before (see this post).
The Friday morning was reserved for some installation and configuration matters a developer should know about:
- using your docker script to refresh your docker container
- the use and assignment of permissions
- personalizing and customizing the web client
- background posting as a means to help Business Central to perform better
In the afternoon Luc van Vugt talked about development lifecycle related matters and handed over two research assignments to be worked on in the coming two weeks: (1) Your company and the methodologies it uses and (2) You as a developer.
As most students mentioned the week was passing quickly having learned a lot, but specifically having done a lot. We all went home for a well deserved weekend, but even more with a lot of knowledge and skills acquired.
what’s next
The technical track will proceed with its 3rd week on 18th of October 2021. In this week the students will be posed a first great challenge having building a standard application. Each day they will have to deliver their code in Azure DevOps and will get it reviewed before the next day.
The functional track will continue on 30th of September with financial management and will contrary to previous years be spread over the next weeks in three clusters of two days.
Feel free to contact us at info@opgona.academy and get more insight into our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Junior training and how it can fit your needs.
