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Microsoft Dynamics 365 2025 Release Wave 1 plan For Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 2025 Release Wave 1 plan For Business Central

WaldoBusiness Central1 month ago18 Views

It’s been a while since I made one of these – and to be totally honest – when typing this sentence, I don’t have a clue (well – may be a little) of what’s going to be in the upcoming Business Central release. But since I want to know, let’s go over the entire list (as we have it today) together .. and as always, I’ll add my honest opinion on them (when I have any).

As always – I’ll be grading them with these:

– I really like it – looking very much forward to it!
– I like it! May be less than others, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good feature!
– I don’t really care – wasn’t waiting for it – I might even worry about it .
– I don’t need to explain this one, right?

I’ll start with some resources, where you can find the full plan, which probably also will be updated in the coming weeks/months:

Development

As always, I’ll start with my most favorite category :-).

Move tables and fields with data across extensions as part of refactoring –

This probably doesn’t need much introduction. I absolutely love the ability to do this.

I know there are a lot of monoliths out there, which can now benefit to be able to more decently isolate functionality to extensions.

This feature actually already existed for Microsoft, and is described here: Moving tables and fields between extensions – Business Central | Microsoft Learn. But now, also partners will be able to do this! Awesome!

Troubleshoot clients, apps, and add-ins with telemetry –

As far as I know, I already do this – so I had to know what they actually mean with this. Lots of blabla – but it seems that it’s mainly about the fact that we’ll get telemetry events when exceptions occur in a client add-in.

Since we’re not really using any add-ins, I wasn’t really waiting for it, but it obviously makes a lot of sense for the people that do!

Although – in my opinion, it’s more like a bugfix than it is a feature ;-).

Mock outbound HttpClient web service calls during testing –

In test-codeunits, we’ll be able to mock outgoing HttpClient calls. Awesome! At this moment, we don’t really test that, because in my opinion, there wasn’t really a good way to do it. It seems now we’ll be getting some kind of possibility where we can create a “Handler” for any call, which can fake a response.

[HttpClientHandler]
procedure MyHandler(path: Text/Uri; requestType: HttpRequestType; var response: TestHttpResponseMessage; var success: Boolean): boolean

Seems very easy and doable!

View build metadata in Extension Management page –

My first reaction – “How is this a development feature?“. Ok, I know – it’s dev-info from the client. But I must say, I never missed this info to have on the client. The app version tells me everything I need to know to find the relevant version in DevOps.

But may be I’m missing something .

Embed Power BI content in web client with new page type –

I’m not a Power-guy, let alone a PowerBI-guy. But I just know this is going to be a very cool feature with lots of potential.

There isn’t a lot of documentation, but I did some investigation. And I found that the pagetype is going to be named “UserControlHost” and is described:

“This page type can be used to only render a single usercontrol in the client. With the UserControlHost page type, the layout is optimized by the client to maximize the available space for the usercontrol.“

In vNext of BC, there are already 79 pages with this pagetype, so lots of examples! Here’s one:

Embedded PowerBI, here we come!

AL Language

There are already some things we know about the AL Language that will be added.

Multiline strings –

Looking something like this:

Thinking about all the text with Copilot-prompts and probably a lot of other usecases, I think this makes sense.

Continue statement –

Simple, but efficient: in a loop, we’ll be able to skip to the next iteration with the “continue” statement. Or to put it into completely useless code:

Preview support in File –

I don’t know yet how to look at this, but we’ll be able to easily preview a file with these statements:

Hopefully more info soon, but previewing PDF or Excel or something like this – always a good ability ;-).

New methods access properties and array elements –

An improvement to access JSON data, like for JsonObject

And for JsonArray

Yaml-support in JsonObject –

Yep, even more abilities in the JsonObject: the ability to read and write Yaml!

Why? No clue. The only yaml-file I can think of is the Page-scripting? So I search the codebase, and it seems they needed this ability for reading countries in the Shopify connector… . You know what they say, right: “you’ll get it when they need it” . (kidding…)

New Command in VSCode to start a new project from a template –

As I never start new projects in VSCode, I honestly have no idea. Although – I’m going to go deeper into this. I assume, this is the command they are talking about:

Which fails at the moment (I guess it’s not ready yet).

But who knows, it’s a smarter way to create a new app following a template.

New IncStr method overload –

This allows for incrementing number series or other similar series by more than one position in one go.

I assume they needed it, but other than “number series”, I can’t seem to think of any other use cases ..

New VS Code actions from the Web Client –

Usually, I don’t care about ANY action in the web client that does stuff in VSCode. Although, now finally they made two interesting ones:

An action to create a launch.json
An action to download extensions as dependencies

Both make the sandboxes more useful as development environment. But let’s be honest. For any decent partner, the current way we need to manage “sandboxes”, isn’t eligible to use them as development environments.

As a partner, we need multiple sandboxes per developer for multiple purposes. 3 per tenant is simply not enough for a partner with multiple developers on a customer, let alone with a crapload of customers. That’s why we – as a pretty big partner – are simply never using sandboxes as development-environments. We only use them as test-environments for customers.

Just imagine, we as partners, would be able to have an unlimited amount of sandboxes in our own tenant – obviously paying for it. The infrastructure is there. Let us pay for it and be even more productive and competitive then we already are!

Microsoft? Anybody? ..

Copilot and AI

Next topic is also quite dear to me – you’ll see at BCTechDays (I hope ;-)).

Chat with Copilot to learn how to use installed add-on apps –

One of the most useful things added ever to Business Central (although not yet available in all countries) is now going to be able to be extended with ISV documentation. Or at least, that’s how I read it. How it will look like? No clue – that’s not included in the documentation. But the good thing is: it’s coming.

What I hated about this page though, is that “Belgium” is still not on the list. I need to move to another country…

Summarize with Copilot –

Again an interesting feature, again only going to be available in a limited amount of countries . Actually .. where’s DEI here?

It looks like it’s going to be a fact box on documents and card pages – even custom ones – that summarized the record by displaying “the top three most impactful insights”.

Sounds promising…

Use Sales Order Agent to automate sales order-taking –

We heard about that, right? The first agentic AI service in Business Central, that will communicate with the customers, create quotes and orders and all. I’d encourage you to read more about it (too much to explain)!

Suggest gas emissions in sustainability journals with Copilot –

No clue how useful this is, but it’s clearly an addition to the “sustainability” app, which is going to be quite important – at least in Europe (in the US, they seem to be going back in time in (not exclusively) this matter .. ).

For greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), Copilot will be able to estimate total emissions based on descriptions and input parameters and adjust emission factors for future use. Honestly, I’m totally clueless about this topic – and I’m proud about it .

Enhance purchase order line matching with Copilot –

Seems that the mapping and matching needed some improvements – and now we get them with this release!

User experiences

I noticed two interesting improvements in terms of User Experiences as well.

Preview PDF attachments directly in web client –

Remember the “preview” statements in AL? Well – that’s the “under the hood”-part of this new feature, where they implemented that. A simple search tells you where:

For developer: do know, we’re going to have to implement this in code before we can benefit from this new ability! Add it on your todo-list!

Optimize screen estate usage on the web –

I didn’t find any screenshot or it wasn’t clear to me what actually changed, so I’ll give the literal description here of what we can expect:

Optimized default narrow mode page sizes.
Optimized sizing and animation of the FactBox pane in narrow mode.
An option to resize the FactBox pane and remember this choice per page and mode.

I particularly like the last one ;-).

Reporting and data analysis

As I already mentioned – I’m not a PowerBI guy. Well, to be completely honest – I’m not a reporting guy altogether. So now you’ll start to see topics that I simply have no opinion on :-). I’ll still mention them though, so you have a simple click-through ..

Access report and request metadata in Word layouts –

We know we are going to see many improvements in the word layouts – and this is one of them. I honestly expect a few more in the next weeks ;-).

This particularly is an extension of the metadata that we would be able to use in reports..

Use enhanced Financial Reporting capabilities

Use enhanced analytics for manufacturing

Governance and administration

Add support for MultiSubnetFailover –

Not much we have under control here – just know that failover will be faster.

View app compatibility with future versions in admin center –

Interesting! Personally, we do a lot to be “ready for vNext”. But I can tell from my own experience that this is not the case for all partners. Now, it’s going to be much more visible which apps will or won’t be ready for vNext, so we can take action much sooner. Good one!

Update sandbox environments to preview versions –

For anyone that want to keep their data in sandboxes, but still want to upgrade to a preview-version – we’ll now be able to upgrade to PREVIEW releases. Awesome!

One note though: starting from 2025 release wave 2, it will be possible. So next release, wave 1, this feature will not be available. One might argue this feature is not part of this release /nit

Another note – I’m not sure that we’ll be able to upgrade from a preview to an actual released version. So I think we should see the feature merely to be able to test our extensions against the upcoming vNext of BC. Nothing more, nothing less. Still very useful though!

Automate environment management with Power Platform connector

Application

You’ll notice, from now on, I don’t really have options anymore – I’ll leave that to the subject matter experts!

Integrate Field Service with service management

View item availability in Field Service work orders

Analyze subscription billing data with Power BI reports

Post foreign currency adjustments to unrealized gain and loss accounts

E-commerce

I know a lot of partners are working on creating, supporting, extending … e-documents. Especially with the upcoming legislation in Europe. So I can imagine all of the features below are VERY important!

Delete incorrect e-documents and avoid duplicates

Activate sales channels in Shopify Connector

Use e-docs with Power Automate and other solutions with APIs

Send e-documents via a service and email simultaneously

Import and export more data using Shopify metafields

Use payments with the E-Document framework

Troubleshoot export issues on Shopify Skipped Records page

Generate multiple incoming e-documents for multiple attachments

Automate embedded attachments in PEPPOL

Create e-documents from posted sales invoices

Process e-documents in two steps

Preview incoming e-invoices prior to processing