Partner Life: From Way Behind to Best Practices Front-Runners

I've worked with several partner organizations in the past year, helping them review their operations and teams. With that assessment, we created both organization and personal development plans. Even at great conferences like this, it may not always be clear where to begin, how to progress, and what the goals should be each step along the way.

This talk is sharing the learned lessons from multiple journeys with partners. We'll cover the phased approach, what key goals to think about, what new roles you need to cultivate, what skills will support those efforts, and how to help your customers and products stay with you along the way.

Breaking Barriers: Embracing Open Source in a Closed-Source Industry

Are you ready to explore the uncharted territories of open source within our traditionally closed-source industry?

Discover our journey so far, gain invaluable takeaways, and explore innovative ways to harness open source for better results that can reshape your solutions and your way of thinking.

Join us for a thought-provoking session where we will explain why open Source Software is still a thing, how commercial needs and free software intersect, what the benefits and downsides are, and most importantly:

How we can apply those concepts to our daily business and our industry.

Evolving Your Solution

You have a working extension or set of extensions. How can you take that solution through all the myriad best practices:
- SOLID Architecture to reduce the Cost of Change and future proof
- Telemetry Intro to understand feature uptake and problem spots
- Core Test Coverage and pipeline basics

And how do you communicate the value of the cost of these efforts to customers/stakeholders?

All of these topics are worthy of their own full exploration, but this session is to help folks catch up with the essentials of each in a fast-changing industry to get attendees -- and the whole team back home -- moving in the right direction.

Streamlining AL Development with GitHub Copilot

Join us for an insightful session where we delve into the world of AL development and the transformative capabilities of GitHub Copilot. Discover how this cutting-edge tool can streamline your development process and enhance your productivity.

🔧 Streamlined Coding: Learn how to leverage Copilot's chat and auto-complete code features to simplify and accelerate your coding tasks.

📝 Expressive Commits: Witness the magic of auto-describing commits with Copilot. Elevate your commit messages and make your development history more engaging and comprehensible.

⚙️ Under the Hood: Gain a deeper understanding of how VS Code Copilot works behind the scenes. Explore the AI-driven mechanisms that power this tool and use this knowledge to your advantage.

🎯 Enhancing Accuracy: Dive into strategies for improving your coding accuracy using insights from Copilot's functionality. Discover techniques to fine-tune your work and reduce errors.

Whether you're a seasoned developer or just getting started with Business Central, this session is designed to provide you with actionable insights and practical techniques for optimizing your development workflow. Don't miss out on this opportunity to unlock the true potential of GitHub Copilot. See you at Directions EMEA 2023!

Testability - The Hammer and the Nail

In the words of Abraham Maslow, the law of the instrument states that if we have a hammer, we tend to see everything as a nail. When it comes to Business Central, the Testing Framework IS a hammer that can help you identify and fix issues you encounter throughout normal operations.

Unleash the full potential of your Business Central toolbox with Testability and TestRunners - while these tools are undoubtedly essential for ensuring your code works, you may be surprised to learn that they can also give your Business Central lifecycle a major boost in many other ways. From debugging to optimization, your testability expertise can take your Business Central game to the next level.

Discover how to accelerate your demos like Microsoft is doing with Contoso, streamline your training and self-onboarding processes, and even create powerful diagnostics and support applications.

Multi-Application Architecture

Everyone is producting their Extensions/Apps and we are mostly driven by our intuition when to create new app or use existing one. It is time to bring some rules into this process.

Microsoft roundtable: Contoso Coffee - new demo data

Microsoft is intending to improve the onboarding and selling experience. This roundtable is intended to be an informal discussion about generating demonstrational data capabilities in Business Central. The first version was recently released and now it's time to hear feedback. Come prepared with suggestions, such as scenarios, patterns, and extensibility suggestions.

Microsoft presents: Contoso Coffee - new demo data

In this session, we will dive into the world of demo data in Business Central. We will share the new patterns we have introduced in Contoso Coffee and future improvements in demo data areas and patterns. We will also discuss the modern demo tool that can generate your custom demo data on demand and open sourcing demo data to the community so that everyone can contribute to it.

Multi-Application Architecture - Hands On

This developer workshop covers some of the deeper lifecycle and design strategies for how to ensure smooth multi-app development, moving from using intuition to thoughtful, rule-driven design. The morning will focus on design planning concepts, discussing pros/cons, and workshopping best practices. The afternoon will focus on how to handle events, interfaces, and dependency inversions.

Getting Traction with Testability: Bring It Forward!

In this session, we'll look at using the Test Framework in Business Central as part of the earlier parts of the sales & implementation cycle so you can get your company (and customers) to see the value earlier and throughout your whole lifecycle. You'll go home with ideas and tools on how to use the Test Framework in ways you've possibly never dreamed of - and just maybe, overcome resistance to getting onboard with Testability in your organization.

Despite being about Testing Tools, this talk is aimed at all the non-technical staff too.