Education Offerings

Education Offerings

Spare Brained Ideas continues to develop more and more offerings to help with education and training in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central space. Currently, we have:

Classes

Our class offerings are detailed topic explorations in an online classroom delivery method. Working with a given topic, usually across multiple live sessions, you will join a group of other students learning all about the chosen subject with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Current Classes Available:

Multi-Application Architecture

Instructors
Kamil Sacek (MVP) & Jeremy Vyska (MVP)

Dates & Times
Jan 23, 26, 30, Feb 2 (Mon & Thu)
4 PM CET

Class Fee
€545 excl. VAT

Limited Availability – sign up while space is available.

This developer class 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. Understand more about when and why a Monolith App might not be the best path, along with how to move to a stronger multi-application design.


The first week will focus on design planning concepts, discussing pros/cons, and workshopping best practices.


The second week will focus on how to handle events, interfaces, and dependency inversions.

About This Class & Goals

For many people writing BC Extensions, particularly folks that are coming from the older NAV C/AL development world, it’s very easy to fire up a new Extension, and then you stuff 100% of everything into that Extension. You publish to the client or AppSource, and done, right?

You avoid having ID conflicts, you avoid dependency circles (or even learning about them), and you can find everything in one big monster Mᴏɴᴏʟɪᴛʜ application. Solves everything, right?

It’s true, you avoid some problems. But, what happens when you have:
– a BC update with a breaking change
– multiple projects (approvers?) all at once making changes
– deployment problems
– change an integration
– 3rd party solutions added/removed

You then will find yourself slowly walking down the path of “maybe this one part should be its own extension”. Quickly, you’ll end up with a nice big plate of Dependency Spaghetti.

As we talked about in our BC TechDays session, there are better ways.

In the session, we looked at the example case of a company growing, adding new functionality over time, adding new integrations, and changing integrations (and dependencies) – the AmuseYou corp.

That was taken directly from the Workshop, where we reviewed, wrote, and rewrote versions of the AmuseYou solutions over the course of the day. The workshop includes exercises to develop the baseline knowledge needed, as well as how to grow.

In this class, we not only talk through all the rules and how to apply them (and how to explain them to customers & stakeholders), but we talk about practical ways to move your *existing* solution forward. How to migrate and evolve.


Workshops

We have a variety of short-duration (1-2 hours) and low-cost Workshops in our upcoming education season:


Being Efficient with AL and VS Code (No Copilot)

Instructor
Jeremy Vyska (MVP)

Dates & Times – Two Options
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024 at 3:00 PM CET (9 AM EST)
Thursday, April 4th, 2024 at 7:00 PM CET (1 PM EST)

Class Fee
€100 excl. VAT

Whenever I teach any class in Business Central, I often find I spend about 10-20% of the class time on all the little tips and tricks I’ve picked up to coding as l̷a̷z̷y̷ efficiently as possible with Visual Studio Code.

This workshop will be a speed run through building a basic new module (application) for Business Central, but with a focus on how to be fast about it. (This means it’s also great for new-to-BC developers, as you’ll see an extension built from scratch.)

This set of sessions is explicitly excluding talk/use of any Copilots.

Being Efficient with AL and VS Code & Copilot

Instructor
Jeremy Vyska (MVP)

Dates & Times – Two Options
Wednesday, April 10th 2024 at 3:00 PM CET (9 AM EST)
Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 7:00 PM CET (1 PM EST)

Class Fee
€100 excl. VAT

This workshop will be a speed run through building a basic new module (application) for Business Central, but with a focus on how to be fast about it. (This means it’s also great for new-to-BC developers, as you’ll see an extension built from scratch.)  This workshop is estimated to run 1-2 hours.

This version is focused on using GitHub Copilot, looking at all the considerations you can use to try to get the most out of your virtual helper.

Excel Reporting in Business Central

Instructor
Jeremy Vyska (MVP)

Dates & Times – Two Options
Wednesday, April 17th 2024 at 3:00 PM CET (9 AM EST)
Thursday, April 18th, 2024 at 7:00 PM CET (1 PM EST)

Class Fee
€100 excl. VAT

This workshop will be a detailed walkthrough on both the how and what to do with Excel Reporting in Business Central 2024, including talking about Queries vs Data Models, translations, and lots more.

Let’s spend some time talking about building the AL data models and setting up your consumers for success.  Then, we’ll pivot and play the role of the “consumer”, building layouts on top of the models you’ve made.

Testability: Requirements and Permutations – WHAT to test?

Instructor
Jeremy Vyska (MVP)

Dates & Times – Two Options
Thursday, March 23rd, 4:00 PM CET (10:00 AM EST)
Monday, March 27th, 7:30 PM CET (1:30 PM EST)

Class Fee
€50 excl. VAT

I cannot recommend strongly enough reading Automated Testing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Cental by Luc van Vugt for understanding the critical why and how questions of Testability.

This workshop focuses on beyond the basics, instead turning our mind from how to build tests to the question of “What to test?”

How do you prioritize, plan for, and communicate with key stakeholders about what testing should focus on? As consultants, product managers, project managers, and even developers – how do you know what the right questions are? Let’s talk about it

Specifications: What are Developers asking for?

Instructor
Jeremy Vyska (MVP)

Dates & Times – Two Options
Thursday, April 6th, 4:00 PM CET (10:00 AM EST)
Monday, April 10th, 7:30 PM CET (1:30 PM EST)

Class Fee
€50 excl. VAT

How many times have you met with a developer, asking for an estimate, and they want more details in their specification? Or how many times do you ask a developer to make something and there was a small (or huge) gap between what you envisioned and what was delivered?

This workshop will build a bridge over that critical knowledge gap – just what is a specification? What should I be getting into one to help make sure to minimize the expensive back and forth between client/user, consultant, and developer?

Courses

On-demand courses are currently in development, and we’re looking forward to offering a wide array of planned topics.

Advisory

The Advisory Service is our customized one-on-one training program meant to deliver deep value in the areas you need most. Read more about it here.