Developer tools and application lifecycle management

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Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Note

These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. To see when this functionality is planned to release, please review What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

Setting up a Unified Operations (Finance and Operations, Retail) development environment is simple and reliable through the availability of ready-to-use cloud and on-premises virtual machines (VMs). This great feature has, however, proven costly to customers and partners because they need to manage many development environments as their development team grows or when they are developing multiple applications or multiple versions of the same application. In addition, our automated build framework also relies on similar VMs (in addition to Azure DevOps) and does not provide automatic deployment of builds to Lifecycle Services (LCS) and sandbox environments.

The Unified Operations development tools, application metadata, and platform will be componentized into standard modules to enable the development of more than one application on the same environment. This will set the stage to remove the dev tools' dependency on preconfigured VMs and will improve the development experience on local computers.

In addition, the build automation framework will not require a VM and will solely rely on Azure DevOps build capabilities. Builds that are release candidates can be automatically deployed to LCS and sandbox cloud environments. This functionality will be released for Public Preview in November 2019.

Update: In time for the April 1, 2019, release, the Visual Studio Marketplace now includes Azure DevOps Tasks to upload and deploy Finance and Operations custom builds (AOT deployable packages). Follow the Insiders tips on development and customization in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations blog for details and related announcements.