Antwerp recently hosted BC Tech Days, an annual event for developers and business owners who develop and accumulate expertise in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV. The SMART business team attended the long-awaited conference, so we are happy to share with you the key insights and Microsoft roadmap on the development of the platform.
Key messages from Microsoft at the BC Tech Days conference
1. Increased use of AI:
- GitHub Copilot will help the developer to write the code. In a new preview, VS Code adds a chat box like ChatGPT where you can request code reviews or write unit tests.
- The Copilot functionality, which allows you to generate descriptions for products, was presented with Business Central 2023 wave 1, and is now available to developers. In code, you can make requests to the AI to generate text (for example, a description of an order line or a reporting line).
2. Using PowerApps with Dynamics 365 BC:
- Microsoft is actively investing in extending BC functionality with Power Apps and Power Automate.
- The use of PowerApps is already included in the Business Central (Essentials or Premium) license.
- Power Automate scripts are now available directly from the Business Central menu, and a developer can add new ones.
- Microsoft announced that External Business Events – something we’ve been waiting for years – are now public. It’s the ability to publish and use events in Business Central as a trigger for Power Automate scripts. For example, you can now create a script to run every time a new sales order is created in Business Central, or when the stock of a particular item is found to be lower than desired.
- Microsoft has created and announced 3 PowerApps mobile application samples that you can use as examples.
- Business Central CI/CD Platform – AL-Go now supports publishing PowerApps along with Business Central folders.
3. Sneak preview from development labs: BC TechDays as an in-depth technical track is interesting because Microsoft shares early previews of features that they plan to add in the future, for example:
- SystemApp internal development moves to GitHub and becomes fully open-source: anyone will see the main branch, be able to review Microsoft code change requests and create their own.
- According to the general vector for code componentization, Microsoft creates a new collection of applications – a layer/space between the System App and the Base App called Foundation. Components common to all modules will be placed there, for example, No. Series, Dimensions, Reason Codes.
- In the future, the Business Central code will support namespaces.
- The demo of Page Scripting, which allows you to record and play back sequences of user actions, looked very promising. Like Selenium, but with platform support.
So, we keep following, waiting, and staying on top of the updates.
The conference, as always, created an atmosphere that encourages each participant to innovate and explore new horizons of the possible. And we, in turn, received vectors for further development of solutions to help our customers be on the wave of innovation and sustainable growth.
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