To start development in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition you need to create a model. To create a new model, open Visual Studio in Finance and Operations development environment and click on Dynamics 365 menu in the toolbar and select Model Management and then click on Create model.... This opens up a wizard to create the model. The following screenshot shows the process of creating a model:

First step in the model creation process is to provide model name, publisher, layer, description of the model and model display name as shown in the preceding screenshot.

Next step is to decide on type of model, you can create two types of models:

• A model that is deployed in its own package: You can use this type of model to create new model elements, and extend the metadata and business logic of referenced models. You can select the referenced models at the time of creating model in Visual Studio. This type of model is compiled into its own assembly and binaries, and will simplify and reduce the cost of upgrades, deployment, and application lifecycle management in general.
• A model that is a part of an existing package: To create customization using overlayering, you need to create model in the existing package.

The following screenshot shows the two options described earlier:

If you wish to do customization using extension approach, you select option Create new package and click Next. Next step will be to Select reference packages and click Next to get to summary page. On the Summary page, validate the information and click Finish to create the model that is shown in the following screenshot:

If you wish to do customization using the overlayering package, you select the option Select existing packages and choose the package from the drop down and click Next to go to Summary page. The following screenshot shows an example of creating a model for overlayering ApplicationSuite:

It it important to note that there has been two focus area for Microsoft since Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition is available in the market. First eliminating overlayering and second splitting the core into multiple models and packages. Eliminating overlayering and splitting the stack into multiple models provides many benefits, including faster compile time and a greater isolation of the code for servicing and deployment. In the Nov 2016 release Microsoft has hard sealed the platform and foundation models and application suite and other models will be hard sealed too as per the roadmap published by Microsoft product team.

Second focus area is package splitting where application suite is being broken into multiple independent packages and models, this enables Microsoft to split the Finance and Operations into multiple smaller applications similar to what is done in CRM application. For example, Microsoft already announced Dynamics 365 for Talent and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail which are used to be HCM and Retail module in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. In future we expect many more such smaller applications carving out of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition product.