Build Environment
Overview
The development language is written in X++ which is specific to Finance & Supply Chain Management. Development changes are checked into DevOps from development instances. The development is always held in source control once the development change has been checked in using Visual Studio.
In order to move those development changes into another environment such as UAT (User Acceptance Testing) a Build Instance is required to create a release of that code. The Build instance fundamentally creates a deployable package, a code release of customisations, that can then be installed into any environment.
There are two ways in which you can host a build instance
Cloud-hosted – A single cloud-hosted build instance that is deployed from LCS (Lifecycle Services)
Azure hosted – The build is hosted in Azure
Cloud-hosted vs Azure hosted
The recommendation is to opt for a Cloud-hosted environments.
However, the table below compares the deployment options:
| Capability | Cloud-hosted | Azure hosted |
| Automated Testing | Yes | No |
| Database Synchronisation | Yes | No |
| Create deployable packages | Yes | Yes |
When deploying the cloud-hosted build instance all the required setup is automatically created in Azure DevOps. However, for the Azure Hosted functionality please refer to the below:
Further recommended reading: