#057 BC DYNAMICS 365 BUSINESS CENTRAL 2024 WAVE 2 RELEASE (A.K.A. BC25)

Application Improvements

• Manage subscription billing and revenue and expense recognition – Business Central now supports a variety of subscription models, allowing you to manage recurring billing for items and services. A straightforward process helps organize and track portfolios of services and products. Mixed subscription contracts combine sales of items and services, detailing billing schedules and other relevant information. Templates streamline the creation of subscription contracts by standardizing billing parameters, automating accrual postings, and ensuring accurate revenue or expense allocation.
• Integrate Field Service with service management – Integrating Business Central with Dynamics 365 Field Service enables seamless management of service tasks, consumption, and financial transactions across teams. Work orders and consumption in Field Service are synchronized with Business Central for efficient invoicing, while consumption and invoiced quantities are updated on the original work order lines.
• Create sales lines easily with Copilot – Copilot can now combine the Find product and Find document by reference skills, useful for companies handling blanket orders, as it searches for products within document lines. Additionally, it supports units of measure, defaulting to the sales unit if the specified one isn’t found.
• Experience enhancements to chat with Copilot – Business Central chat with Copilot is now faster and better at data inquiries, generating analysis tabs directly from the Chat pane for insights. It can filter and sort data from the current page and offers interconnected AI assistance, identifying built-in features and extensions. Copilot is also more knowledgeable, drawing from Microsoft Learn, and provides new example prompts with tips to improve your prompt skills.
• Reconcile payment transactions in Shopify with invoices – Integrating Business Central with Shopify allows centralized management of online sales and payments, tracking various payment methods like gift cards and credit cards. It also creates customer and general ledger entries to ensure accurate accounting and reporting.
• Get in-product notifications about issues with job queue background processing – Business Central allows background processing of tasks, and in-product notifications help quickly address issues if a critical process fails or isn’t scheduled.
• Use embedded Power BI reports out of the box – Business Central offers various reporting and BI dashboard options, with new Power BI reports added for finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, and projects. You can also embed Power BI Metrics scorecards to track key KPIs directly within the system.

Technical Improvements

• Restore extensions if publishing from Visual Studio Code fails – When publishing an extension from Visual Studio Code fails, the system attempts to recover any extensions that were uninstalled during the failed process. If the restoration isn’t fully successful, developers receive details about which extensions were restored and which ones couldn’t be recovered, improving transparency.
• Run code action for ‘with’ for file, project, or workspace – Previously, the code action for converting ‘with’ statements to explicit records was limited to individual instances, resulting in significant manual effort for developers. With this release, the conversion can now be applied to the entire Document, active Project, or the entire Workspace, streamlining the process.
• Set up easier in-client performance profiling with rules – This release facilitates quicker and easier profile capture by allowing automatic and noninteractive performance profile capture in the background based on specific rules. When setting up a new profile capture schedule, users can configure options such as enabling/disabling the schedule, setting start and end times, adding descriptions, selecting user IDs and activity types, defining sampling frequency, establishing a profile creation threshold, and determining the retention period for captured profiles.
• Specify and use full-text search indexes on table fields – AL developers can now determine which table fields are included in full-text search indexes, enhancing the speed and effectiveness of various search functions, such as companywide searches, list page searches, and lookup searches. To configure full-text search, you can set the OptimizeForTextSearch property on table fields or extensions, and a new && filter syntax is available in the SetFilter() method in AL code.
• Type testing and casting operators for interfaces – This version introduces support for casting between AL interfaces, allowing to cast interface A to interface B if the underlying object (currently only codeunits) implements B. Two new operators, ‘is’ and ‘as’, have been added to streamline these casting operations.
• Use the ‘this’ keyword for codeunit self reference – The introduction of a this keyword allows passing the current object as method arguments, replacing less efficient workarounds and enhancing readability in larger methods by clarifying variable scope.
• Use the ternary operator when coding in the AL language – AL now supports the ternary operator ? :, familiar from other programming languages, which simplifies conditional operations, improves readability, and reduces verbosity. This operator is especially beneficial for simple conditions, allowing for variable initialization in a single line to ensure proper assignment and minimize code length.
• Manage per-tenant extensions in admin center – This release introduces a feature allowing Business Central administrators to manage PTEs directly from the admin center and its API, similar to current AppSource app management, streamlining the process by enabling management across various environments and tenants without accessing each client individually.

See the full list of what’s new and planned for Business Central in the link below:

What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central