Covers Visual Studio, the Application Explorer, models and packages, cloud-hosted and local development environments, Git branching, Azure DevOps pipelines, deployable packages, the Power Platform admin center, environment strategy, regression testing and the Regression Suite Automation Tool, the one-version update obligation, and the Data management framework. Contrasts every tool and discipline directly with Plex's always-current, no-deployment model.
This chapter is where the cultural shift lands. In Plex, there is no development lifecycle because there is no development. Configuration is live when saved. There is no build, no deploy, no source control, no environment strategy, no regression-testing obligation.
D365 development happens in Visual Studio with the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations developer tools extension. The extension provides three things Plex has no equivalent of:
A model is the unit of metadata ownership in D365. Every AOT object belongs to exactly one model. Microsoft's standard models — Application Suite, Application Platform, Application Foundation — ship inside sealed packages that receive service updates.
In Plex, the tenant is the canonical source. Configuration lives in the tenant, and the tenant is the only copy.
The Azure DevOps build pipeline is the bridge between source code and a deployable environment. It does three things:
In Plex, there is one environment: the tenant. Everything happens there — configuration, testing, production use. Rockwell's continuous-delivery model manages the stability of this shared space.
Plex runs a continuous-delivery model: "a single, always current line of SaaS code" delivered to all customers simultaneously, with no customer-controlled version freeze. The customer never sees an update notification, never validates a release, and never schedules a maintenance window.
The Regression Suite Automation Tool (RSAT) is Microsoft's answer to the regression-testing obligation created by the service-update cadence. It works like this:
The Data management framework (DMF) is D365's entity-based integration platform. It handles bulk import, bulk export, recurring data jobs, staging and validation:
Plex moves configuration by saving it in the tenant. There is no export, no import, no promotion — the configuration is live.
The development lifecycle D365 requires is the lifecycle Plex never had. Every tool — Visual Studio, Git, Azure DevOps, PPAC, RSAT — exists because D365 is a versioned, extensible, package-deployed application. The overhead is real, and it is permanent.