Business Central 28.0 Preview: the 2026 Release Wave 1 is a consolidation play

jarmestoBusiness Central3 hours ago33 Views

MCP Server goes GA. Quality Management finally arrives. Index tuning lands in the UI. And yes, there’s a new logo.

The public preview for Business Central 28.0 (2026 Release Wave 1) dropped in early March. GA lands in April, with the Launch Edition on April 1st. Where the 27.x cycle was all about introducing the AI Development Toolkit and shipping the first custom agents, this wave is about turning those bets into production-ready infrastructure. It also packs meaningful functional, developer tooling, and governance improvements that deserve a close look.

This is not an exhaustive feature list — the official docs have you covered there. Instead, I’m focusing on the changes I think partners, developers, and customers should pay attention to right now.

Copilot and agents: infrastructure, not headlines

BC 28 doesn’t ship a brand-new agent the way wave 2 did with the Sales Order Agent and the Payables Agent. The story here is about hardening what’s already in motion.

The dedicated task pane centralizes agent task management in one place. No more hunting across different pages to figure out what each agent is up to. You can monitor, stop, and review tasks for all agents from a single view. The new «Stop all active tasks for selected agent» action is a practical fix for a real pain point — agents getting stuck after pulling in too many tasks.

Inline content review lets users approve or reject agent-generated output directly on the page where the data lives, rather than bouncing to a separate log. It’s a small UX shift that makes human-in-the-loop feel less like overhead.

Avatars on list records showing who created or modified each entry might look like a visual polish, but they carry real weight: you can now tell at a glance whether a record was touched by an agent or a person. Instant auditability.

For ISVs, AI resources for Copilot extensions enters preview. This means third-party extensions can tap into Microsoft-managed AI infrastructure instead of spinning up and maintaining their own Azure OpenAI deployments. That’s a significant barrier removed.

AL Development: the tooling upgrade

This is where BC 28 gets dense — in the best way.

Semantic search on data and metadata is GA. AL developers can now query Business Central using semantic similarity, not just exact text matching. If you’re building custom agents, this changes how they discover relevant records.

Symbols from NuGet. The new AL: Download Symbols from Global Sources command pulls app packages straight from Microsoft’s public NuGet feeds — no connected environment required. Supports country-specific packages via al.symbolsCountryRegion and custom feeds via al.customNugetFeeds. For anyone running CI/CD with ephemeral containers, this is a big workflow simplification.

Fully qualified names everywhere. New method overloads let you run codeunits, pages, and reports by their fully qualified name (namespace included). RecordRef.Open gets the same treatment. Less ambiguity in large, namespace-heavy extensions.

AL Tests from VS Code. You can now run your AL test suites directly from the editor. The red-green-refactor loop just got tighter.

BC-Bench ships as GA — a formal benchmark for evaluating how well AL coding agents perform. If you’re working with ALDC or any development agent framework, this gives you a structured way to measure output quality.

Troubleshooting MCP Server for AL (preview) brings diagnostic tooling into the MCP protocol. Wire it up to an agent and you get AI-assisted troubleshooting of your code and environment.

Agent template in AL: New Project. The project scaffolding command now offers an Agent template with the base structure and getting-started instructions. No more copying boilerplate from BCTech samples.

Functional: the features customers will actually feel

Quality Management (preview). BC 28 ships a native module for goods and materials quality evaluation. For companies that need inbound inspection workflows, this fills a gap that previously required an ISV solution or custom development.

Plastic and sugar taxes (preview). Excise tax calculation for plastic and sugar, targeting European jurisdictions rolling out these levies. Relevant for food, beverage, and packaging companies.

Withholding taxes for vendors (preview). Automatic withholding tax calculation — a long-standing request across multiple localizations.

Self-billed invoices (preview). Self-billing support for subcontracting and intercompany scenarios. Another feature that’s been on wish lists for years.

Drop shipment improvements. You can now create purchase orders from drop shipments, post purchase invoices independently of the related sales invoice, and reverse drop shipments when documents aren’t yet invoiced. Three targeted fixes for real distribution friction.

Multi-line invoice matching. Purchase invoices can now match against multiple order and receipt lines. The base ERP catches up with what the Payables Agent was already doing.

Reporting and analysis

Financial Reporting enhancements. The improvements Kennie Pontoppidan has been previewing with the Financial Reporting Heros group go official: audit logs for financial reports, lifecycle status on definitions (draft, published), and smarter defaults on the card page.

Default Language Code at company level. You can now set the document language per company. A straightforward fix for a persistent headache in multilingual organizations.

New APIs for auditors. Dedicated APIs for analyzing user and group permissions across apps, plus approval workflow analysis. Built for auditors and IT staff who need cross-cutting visibility.

Governance and administration

MCP Server in Admin Center (preview). The MCP Server now extends to the Business Central Admin Center. AI agents can connect directly to tenant administration, opening up scenarios that previously required PowerShell scripts or direct Admin Center API calls.

Database index management per company. A new UI lets you inspect index details — usage stats, storage cost, type (AL-defined vs. system-generated) — and disable non-unique indexes with low usage to cut storage costs and improve write performance. Unique indexes, primary keys, SIFT, and systemid indexes are protected.

Cloud migration from any SQL database (preview). The cloud migration tool now accepts any SQL database as a source, not just NAV or BC on-premises. This opens a path for migrating data from legacy ERPs sitting on SQL Server.

Features changing status in v28.0

An important caveat first. The 27.3 and 27.5 update docs list features that Microsoft expects to make mandatory in the next wave. But the definitive list is confirmed when the version reaches GA. The official «Optional features that are now mandatory» page doesn’t include a v28.0 section yet. What follows is the projected list, not the final confirmation.

That said, several features are clearly changing status and should be tested now:

G/L currency revaluation — This one looks confirmed mandatory. If you have extensions touching the revaluation process, test now.

New sales pricing experience — Extensions still relying on the legacy pricing model need to adapt before April. Another strong candidate for no-going-back.

Advanced Tell Me (semantic search) — Semantic search in Tell Me becomes the default.

Calculate only visible FlowFields — Only visible FlowFields get calculated. Performance gain, but it can break extensions that assume all FlowFields are always calculated.

Auto-save with every field change — Auto-save becomes the default behavior.

New communication texts for reminder terms — Changes to how reminder term texts are generated.

Server certificate validation for HTTP requests — AL HTTP calls will validate SSL certificates. If you have integrations using self-signed certs, review them.

MCP Server access — This one needs nuance. What Microsoft is signaling is that the MCP Server will be enabled by default and ready to configure. It doesn’t mean every tenant will automatically expose data to external agents — it means the capability ships turned on, and the admin can then configure which APIs are exposed and with what operations. Without explicit configuration, agents only get read-only access to standard API pages. It’s a stance change — from opt-in to enabled by default — but not an automatic data exposure. Whether this ends up truly mandatory (can’t be turned off) or simply enabled by default (admin can disable) will be confirmed at GA.

The recommendation stands: enable these features in Feature Management on your current 27.x environment and run your extension test suites now. Waiting until April is not the move.

The bottom line

BC 28 is a consolidation wave. The 27.x cycle introduced the big bets — AI Development Toolkit, custom agents, MCP Server. This wave wires them into the production fabric: MCP ships enabled by default across tenants, the task pane centralizes agent management, ISVs get access to managed AI resources, and BC-Bench provides a formal way to evaluate agent quality. On the functional side, Quality Management finally arrives as a native capability, and the developer tooling — NuGet symbols, VS Code tests, agent scaffolding — meaningfully shortens the build cycle.

For partners, the immediate action item is enabling the projected mandatory features and testing extensions. For AL developers, spin up a BC 28 sandbox and try the new tooling. For anyone building custom agents, MCP being enabled by default means your integration surface expands across every tenant in the ecosystem without the customer having to flip a switch.

The Launch Edition is April 1st. The preview sandbox is one click away. Now’s the time.

Already exploring BC 28 preview? I’d love to hear which features you’re testing. Drop a comment or reach out on LinkedIn.

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