Video: How to get a free cloud sandbox

In this video I’m going to show how to create a new Microsoft tenant and setup a trial version of Business Central that can be used for learning and development.

Bonus content, while I wait I also set up a Dynamics 365 (CRM) trial environment.

In this video, Erik walks through the complete process of getting a free Business Central cloud sandbox — no credit card required. Starting from scratch, he creates a brand new Microsoft tenant, signs up for a Business Central trial, and provisions a sandbox environment that’s ready for AL development. As a bonus, he also demonstrates signing up for a Dynamics 365 CRM trial on the same tenant.

Why You Need a Cloud Sandbox

If you’re learning AL development for Business Central, or you simply want to explore the platform without committing to a paid subscription, a free cloud sandbox is the way to go. It gives you a full-blown Business Central environment where you can develop extensions, test customizations, and learn the platform — all without spending a dime.

This trick is also covered in Erik’s book, The Field Guide to Business Central, which is a general guide on getting started with Business Central (not a programming book).

Step 1: Create a Microsoft Tenant

The first step is to head over to signup.microsoft.com. This is where you sign up for any Microsoft account. You’ll see two options:

  • A personal account (Xbox Live / Outlook.com)
  • A work or school account — this is the one you need

Click on the work/school account option. You’ll be asked for your email address, name, country, and phone number. Here’s where the trick begins — you don’t need an existing work email to proceed.

On the next screen, you can set up a brand new tenant. All Microsoft tenants have a name in the format yourname.onmicrosoft.com. Choose a tenant name (e.g., “hogardemo”), create an admin email address (e.g., erik@hogardemo.onmicrosoft.com), and set a password.

After verifying your phone number with a text message code, Microsoft will begin provisioning your tenant. This tenant is the foundation for Office 365, Microsoft 365, Power BI, and everything else in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Once the tenant is created, Microsoft will suggest you buy various products — but you don’t need to purchase anything.

Step 2: Sign Up for the Business Central Trial

With your tenant ready, navigate to trials.dynamics.com. Select Business Central and enter the email address you just created (e.g., erik@hogardemo.onmicrosoft.com).

The signup process will go through several URLs and redirects. After a short wait, you’ll land on the Business Central page with a “finishing setup” progress indicator. No credit cards are involved — just the phone number verification from earlier.

Note: During high-demand periods, provisioning may take longer than expected due to pressure on cloud providers.

Step 3: Navigate to the Admin Center (Don’t Start the Trial!)

This is an important detail. When Business Central first loads, you’ll see a production environment with an option to start a 30-day trial. Don’t click that button. Starting the trial on the production environment will begin a countdown you don’t want.

Instead, click the gear icon and go to the Admin Center. This is where you manage all your Business Central environments.

Step 4: Create a Sandbox Environment

In the Admin Center, you’ll see your production environment running version 16.1 (or whichever is current). Click New to create a new environment:

  • Name: Sandbox (or whatever you prefer)
  • Type: Sandbox
  • Country: Select your country (Erik notes that the UAE often gets selected by accident since it’s first alphabetically — make sure you choose correctly!)
  • Version: The latest available

Click Create and wait for the sandbox to be provisioned. You can have up to three sandboxes on a single tenant.

To see your new Business Central environment appear on the Dynamics 365 home page (home.dynamics.com), you may need to click the Sync button.

Bonus: Sign Up for Dynamics 365 CRM

While waiting for Business Central to deploy, Erik demonstrates that you can also sign up for other Dynamics 365 trials on the same tenant — including Sales (CRM), Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, Finance & Operations, HR, and Retail. Each trial adds its corresponding license to your tenant.

You can verify all your assigned licenses by going to office.com, navigating to the Admin Center, and checking your user profile under Users.

Deploying Your First AL Extension

Once your sandbox is up and running, you’re ready to start developing AL extensions. Here’s a simple “Hello World” example to verify everything is working. The app.json file defines your extension’s metadata:

{
  "id": "9a607e85-dc9f-4a35-bf01-d32c8064f07b",
  "name": "cloudsandboxfor6bucks",
  "publisher": "Default publisher",
  "version": "1.0.0.0",
  "brief": "",
  "description": "",
  "privacyStatement": "",
  "EULA": "",
  "help": "",
  "url": "",
  "logo": "",
  "dependencies": [],
  "screenshots": [],
  "platform": "1.0.0.0",
  "application": "22.0.0.0",
  "idRanges": [
    {
      "from": 50100,
      "to": 50149
    }
  ],
  "resourceExposurePolicy": {
    "allowDebugging": true,
    "allowDownloadingSource": true,
    "includeSourceInSymbolFile": true
  },
  "runtime": "11.0",
  "features": [
    "NoImplicitWith"
  ]
}

And here’s a simple page extension that displays a message when the Customer List is opened:

pageextension 50100 CustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage();
    begin
        Message('App published: Hello world');
    end;
}

This extension hooks into the OnOpenPage trigger of the Customer List page and shows a “Hello world” message — a quick way to confirm that your development environment is connected to your cloud sandbox and that you can publish extensions successfully.

Managing Your Tenant

Your new tenant is a fully functional Microsoft tenant — it’s not a demo version. Through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center at office.com, you can:

  • Manage users — add more users beyond the initial admin account
  • View licenses — see all trial and paid licenses assigned to users
  • Handle billing — even though you haven’t purchased anything yet
  • Add custom domains — if you later want to use your own domain instead of the onmicrosoft.com address, you can add and verify a custom domain under Setup → Domains
  • Purchase licenses — you can convert this into a full production tenant by buying licenses through the store

Note that without an Exchange Online license, there’s no mailbox attached to your user. You’d need to purchase a mail license separately if you want email functionality.

Quick Recap

  1. Go to signup.microsoft.com and create a new work/school tenant
  2. Go to trials.dynamics.com and sign up for Business Central using your new tenant email
  3. Once Business Central is provisioned, go to the Admin Center (not the production environment)
  4. Create a Sandbox environment — you can have up to three
  5. Start developing AL extensions and exploring Business Central

The entire process requires no credit card and no paid subscriptions. You end up with a full-blown Business Central sandbox environment where you can learn AL development, test extensions, and explore the platform at your own pace. It’s the quickest way to get started with Business Central development if you don’t have access to an on-premises Docker setup or an existing tenant.

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