Everything from here on assumes you have a working environment to practice in, plus the handful of free tools every D365 CE developer ends up installing. This chapter gets both in place.

1. Get a free developer environment

Microsoft offers a free, non-expiring Power Apps Developer Plan environment, intended exactly for this kind of learning:

  1. Go to powerapps.microsoft.com/developerplan and sign up with a work, school, or personal Microsoft account.
  2. This provisions a personal environment with a full Dataverse database, Sales/Customer Service apps included, and no 30-day trial expiry.
  3. Sign in at make.powerapps.com and confirm you can see your new environment in the environment picker (top right).

This environment is for solo learning, not multi-user team development — but it’s exactly what you need to follow the rest of this course path hands-on.

2. Install XrmToolBox

XrmToolBox is a free, community-built Windows application that wraps dozens of plugins for common Dataverse admin and development tasks — things the standard UI makes tedious, like bulk metadata comparisons, solution management, and record auditing. Download it from xrmtoolbox.com, launch it, and connect it to your developer environment using your Microsoft account. It’s not officially a Microsoft product, but it’s close to a de facto standard tool on real D365 CE projects.

3. Get the Plugin Registration Tool

If you plan to write plugins (covered in depth in the Plugins course), you’ll need the Plugin Registration Tool to register compiled plugin assemblies against your environment. It’s distributed via NuGet as part of the Microsoft.PowerPlatform.CDS.Client / Dataverse SDK tooling, or as an XrmToolBox plugin. We’ll walk through installing and using it when we get to plugin registration specifically.

4. Set up Visual Studio (optional, for later)

You don’t need this yet, but if you’re planning to follow the Plugins course, Visual Studio Community (free) with the .NET Framework development workload is the standard environment for writing and compiling D365 CE plugins. No need to configure anything yet — we’ll cover the exact project setup when we get there.

That’s the whole Get Started course. You now know what D365 CE is, how environments work, where to navigate, the shape of licensing, and you have a real environment to build in. Next up: Customization — tables, columns, relationships, forms, and the rest of the core building blocks.