More Power to you: About equality in PowerShell and finding next Monday in Power Automate

Nov 26, 2023

Just two quick lessons I learned in the last few weeks: Lesson 1: Equal isn’t equal in PowerShell when it comes to environment variables This was an issue a colleague... [read more]

Creating a BC only container image

Oct 26, 2023

I sometimes take half a look at at the bccontainerhelper issues and recently one caught my eye: Question: How to create a [Business Central] “service only” container, by KristofKlein. Not... [read more]

Easily access files in your containers

Sep 7, 2023

This is a little “service post” where I want to show you three ways how to easily interact with the file system of your container, mainly driven by the relatively... [read more]

Docker Desktop resource saving got an amazing improvement

Aug 17, 2023

Docker Desktop, the “one-click-install application for your Mac, Linux, or Windows environment that lets you build, share, and run containerized applications and microservices” has a new release, v4.22, and for... [read more]

Generate your own Business Central API client with Kiota

Aug 6, 2023

I know that there are tons of options for low-code / no-code integrations with Business Central and those certainly have merit. But sometimes, you just want or need a piece... [read more]

Vacation everywhere - how to keep track

Jul 22, 2023

It’s vacation time in Germany, so this will be a short, but topical blog post: How to keep track of the planned vacation of your team? The TL;DR A manually... [read more]

AL development in a GitHub Codespace with sources in an Azure DevOps repo

Jun 4, 2023

GitHub Codespaces and the underlying technology of Visual Studio Code devcontainers are a real game changer when it comes to development efficiency and velocity. I’ve been using them as much... [read more]

How to identify the apps in a BC Online export

May 26, 2023

This is going to be a very short blog post, but hopefully still helpful for those of you in the same situation as me: How can I find out what... [read more]

34spiele.de, an easy containerized, Azure-driven dev and ops experience

Apr 23, 2023

The easyCredit Basketball Bundesliga is the top-level German Basketball league, but it doesn’t have an option to try and predict the remaining games of a season to see what the... [read more]

Run Fermyon Spin in Docker Desktop or Azure Kubernetes Service

Mar 27, 2023

I have previously shared my little Fermyon Spin tool to duplicate planner plans with adjustments and the Blazor frontend for it. What I haven’t shared yet is a good way... [read more]

Adding all your To-Do and Planner tasks to your calendar with Power Automate

Feb 25, 2023

I am a bit (ok, probably a lot) of a task management fanatic. At the end of the week, I usually like to have an idea of my tasks for... [read more]

A Blazor frontend for the WebAssembly Planner duplication tool running on Fermyon spin

Jan 31, 2023

In my last blog post, I described a new version of my tool to duplicate Planner plans with adjustments. It might make sense to look into the why or at... [read more]

.NET in WebAssembly with Fermyon Spin or how to duplicate your Planner plans with adjustments

Dec 31, 2022

I want to preface this blog post with the note that I typically know a lot more about a topic when I write about it than this time. But I... [read more]

Azure DevOps Simplify - the community extension to work more efficiently with Azure DevOps from VS Code

Nov 16, 2022

Looking at the Azure DevOps Roadmap with lots of planned improvements across the board (pun intended) for 2023 and even further, it seems clear to me that Microsoft has ramped... [read more]

Manage your self hosted GitHub Runners with Portainer and Traefik on an Azure VM with Docker

Oct 23, 2022

Inspired by this very interesting blog post by Portainer, I want to share something that I have been using for quite some time now as you might not need the... [read more]

Microsoft Dev Box A new Azure service for developer productivity

Sep 1, 2022

With a recent announcement, Microsoft launched a very interesting new Azure service, which has the potential to drastically increase developer productivity: Azure Dev Box. Dev Box allows companies to provide... [read more]

Creating a Docker extension to calculate the size of an image

Aug 14, 2022

Ever since the announcement of Docker extensions three months ago, I was intrigued, and I immediately installed the nice “Disk usage” extension. However, being a developer, I wanted to also... [read more]

Serverless development of an Azure Functions app with a GitHub Codespace

Jul 24, 2022

“Serverless” is probably one of the most used (and abused) buzzwords in the Software industry these days, and my favorite quote on that is: “There are as many servers in... [read more]

Host the Swagger UI for your BC OpenAPI spec in your BC container

Jun 29, 2022

Business Central has become a pretty open ERP system with maybe not a great, but certainly a fair API, that can be used to integrate with 3rd party applications or... [read more]

Running Traefik in a container on a modern Windows Server version

May 28, 2022

Traefik is one of the most popular choices for reverse proxies, especially in containerized environments where it is extremely easy to set up and configure. However, due to a limitation... [read more]

Running Teslalogger with Portainer

Apr 30, 2022

This time, a blog post about “non-business tech”, but of course containerized and with Portainer: Teslalogger is a self-hosted data logger for Tesla cars. The idea of this and similar... [read more]

Test / dev Windows VM setup on Azure

Mar 26, 2022

I have written about remote development in the past (1, 2), but in the last couple of month and years, I have also had more and more occasions where it... [read more]

Get your BC artifact URLs without PowerShell

Feb 19, 2022

In June 2020, a drastic change happened to how we can work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central in containers: Instead of ready made images, BC started to rely on... [read more]

World, meet 4PS Germany

Feb 3, 2022

The time has come to share the news: I am extremely happy that I am now part of the 4PS Group family! This allows me to stay in my technology... [read more]

Using AAD authentication for development against a Business Central container

Jan 18, 2022

Since a long time, it is possible to use Azure AD authentication in your Business Central OnPrem environment, whether containerized or not. But what isn’t possible - or at least... [read more]

Catch you later, COSMO

Dec 31, 2021

If you are looking for the usual technical content on my blog, this is one of the posts you can skip because I want to share something else and entirely... [read more]

Deploying Business Central in an Azure Container Instance using Bicep

Dec 27, 2021

More than four years ago, I blogged about the usage of Azure Container Instances for Business Central (well, NAV at that time) including an Azure Quickstart Template and I wanted... [read more]

Exploring files from a Windows container host through Filebrowser

Nov 8, 2021

Having a web-based file explorer functionality for a Windows-Server-base container host is a surprisingly difficult task. In our COSMO Azure DevOps & Docker Self-Service, we always include an Azure File... [read more]

Connecting a BC container to an external SQL server

Oct 13, 2021

As part of my DynamicsCon session in September 2021, I wanted to show how you can connect a Business Central container to an existing SQL Server. Unfortunately, I ran out... [read more]

More news for Windows (Server) containers

Sep 29, 2021

Update: I got some feedback after posting this, so I changed and added some aspects, all marked with Update:/Update end for those who read it before and only want to... [read more]

News in the Windows container and Docker world

Sep 2, 2021

The last couple of days brought a lot of news for the container world, especially for those using Windows containers or Docker Desktop. As it can be difficult to follow... [read more]

Docker container stack deployments with dependent files through Portainer

Aug 29, 2021

I have written before about the recently released Portainer feature of deploying a Docker container stack from a git repo. A part of that feature that I didn’t immediately understand... [read more]

MS SQL Server in Windows containers

Jul 18, 2021

Running databases in containers is maybe not the most intuitive usage of containers, but certainly stateful containers in general are no longer completely out of limits, and that means that... [read more]

Use Portainer to deploy and update Docker container stacks from a git repo

Jun 5, 2021

This will be a quick intro to an upcoming feature in Portainer, but please note that as of today (June 5th 2021) this is in preview, so you shouldn’t use... [read more]

Develop Azure DevOps extensions

May 30, 2021

Since around 2013 I am using Azure DevOps or at that time Team Foundation Server. I wasn’t a huge fan in the early days, but it has gotten continuously better... [read more]

Running Linux and Windows containers at the same time on Windows 10

Apr 24, 2021

I am typically using Docker on my Windows 10 laptop for dev containers, which (unfortunately) means only Linux containers, although my professional context mostly is Windows-oriented. However I recently did... [read more]

Minimalistic C# APIs with FeatherHttp

Mar 30, 2021

As you may or may not be aware, the annual MVP Summit for Microsoft MVPs is happening from March 29th to April 1st 2021. I’ve had the chance to travel... [read more]

Creating a Windows Docker Swarm on Azure using Terraform, part IV: Easily navigate the nodes with SSH

Mar 2, 2021

After talking about the overall picture in part one, the infrastructure setup and configuration in part two and the PowerShell scripts in part three, I now want to share in... [read more]

Creating a Windows Docker Swarm on Azure using Terraform, part III: PowerShell scripts

Feb 2, 2021

After the overall setup in part one and the Docker Swarm, Terraform, OpenSSH and Docker Compose setup for Portainer and Traefik in part two, I want to walk you through... [read more]

Creating a Windows Docker Swarm on Azure using Terraform, part II: Terraform and configurations

Jan 5, 2021

It’s been a while, but in part one of this post series, I have explained the overall architecture and approach to create a Windows Docker Swarm on Azure using Terraform,... [read more]

Building Docker images for multiple Windows Server versions using self hosted containerized Github runners

Dec 9, 2020

In our Azure DevOps & Docker Self-Service offering, we already have a couple of instances up and running, based on Windows Server 1809. And while that works well, we also... [read more]

Portainer access control setup

Dec 5, 2020

Portainer is a great tool to simplify container management, that I’ve been using for quite some time by now. In fact, my first blog post on that topic is from... [read more]

Easily calculate Azure cost with a Deno CLI application, developed in a VS Code dev container

Nov 26, 2020

For an upcoming service offering I had to calculate the expected cost for the Azure services we are going to use and I wanted to give Deno a try for... [read more]

Server jobs in Azure DevOps pipelines

Oct 31, 2020

I am a big fan of completely pristine build environments. If you create dedicated VMs for your builds and host Azure DevOps agents there, you can try to keep those... [read more]

Year one as a COSMOnaut and why I loved it

Oct 10, 2020

This is one of my rare non-technical posts, so if you are here for the tech stuff, this won’t be what you expect :) October 1st marked my one-year anniversary... [read more]

Please, BC, stay healthy (and how can you check that)

Sep 25, 2020

I am not sure how broadly known the topic of this post already is, so this might be a boring one: How can you tell if a Business Central (and... [read more]

Creating a Windows Docker Swarm on Azure using Terraform, part I: Overview

Aug 29, 2020

This post has taken a very long time. Two years and one day ago I wrote about Windows authentication in Docker Swarm and nine months1 ago I showed a Docker... [read more]

Using an Azure DevOps pipeline with a GitHub repo to push a Docker image to an Azure Container Registry

Aug 3, 2020

When Microsoft bought GitHub, a bit of an uproar went through the Open Source community as many developers still thought of Microsoft as a very closed, anti-Open-Source company, and they... [read more]

Making applications served through Traefik more secure

Jul 4, 2020

If you use Traefik to securely and flexibly make your containers reachable, you might use a service like the Qualys SSL Labs Server Test to find out how good your... [read more]

Making use of the new BC artifacts

Jun 28, 2020

As you probably have seen (1, 2, 3, 4 1) if you are following what is happening with Business Central on Docker, Microsoft has overhauled the way all of this... [read more]

Upload a file to Azure Blob Storage and share access securely through Azure Key Vault

Jun 27, 2020

Did you ever have the need to store a file “somewhere in the cloud” and give someone or something access without the possibility to enter account information or similar means... [read more]

Container to container WinRM

May 31, 2020

I have shared the basics of a Docker Swarm based setup to host containers on an Azure VM scale set on multiple occasions and we are right now in the... [read more]

Remote Dev with VS Code against a Windows host is easy now

Apr 30, 2020

I previously wrote about remote dev and why I think this might be a game changer. At that time, it was quite a number of burning hoops you had to... [read more]

BC behind Traefik 2 (yes, that enables C/SIDE and RTC)

Mar 31, 2020

Every since the release of Traefik 2 half a year ago I wanted to give it a try. Partly because I just like trying out new stuff, but mainly because... [read more]

An update on AL interfaces: implementation details

Mar 30, 2020

I recently wrote update the new AL language feature interfaces, coming with Business Central 2020 release wave 1 (a.k.a. BC 16). While I really liked what I saw at that... [read more]

Automating organization and project creation in Azure DevOps

Mar 15, 2020

A lot of great content is available if you want to learn how to automate tasks with Azure DevOps, most often probably for Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) but... [read more]

Handle secrets in Windows based GitHub actions and Docker containers

Feb 24, 2020

Handling secrets can be a tough problem, especially in automated build environments that are publicly available like GitHub actions1 in a public repository. Consider the following examples: You need to... [read more]

Creating a combined work item list from multiple Azure DevOps organizations and why that matters for GDPR

Feb 23, 2020

When working with Azure DevOps including customers, you probably are using multiple organizations as some customers will want you to run everything and some will want to use their own... [read more]

Interfaces in AL and why that matters

Feb 1, 2020

While NAV TechDays 2019 was an amazing conference with a lot of highlights and interesting news, one to me clearly stood out: The announcement that Business Central will get interfaces... [read more]

Using Azure Managed Identities in containers

Jan 6, 2020

Handling authentication and credential management is one of the key security challenges in many projects and certainly a main differentiator between PoC / dev projects and real live production grade... [read more]

Access your BC container behind traefik using the mobile app

Dec 7, 2019

If you are running multiple Business Central containers on the same VM and want to have access to them from outside of that VM, you have to implement a way... [read more]

Debugging BC when using VS Code's Remote Development (SSH) feature

Nov 4, 2019

As described in my previous blog post, you can use the Remote Development feature of VS Code to seamlessly develop with a big Azure VM as “workhorse”. However the usual... [read more]

Remote development for BC with VS Code

Oct 19, 2019

If you have worked with larger AL solutions or been to Directions EMEA 20191 and the session by Peter Borring on the move from C/AL to AL, you know that... [read more]

Welcome to my new blog

Oct 17, 2019

As I have recently switched companies and now work for Cosmo Consult, I have started this new blog to share my content. I will probably write about the same kind... [read more]