BCTalent – Escape Rooms

Last month, something cool happened.

You must have heard about the #BCTalent program from Microsoft.  It’s an initiative, designed to address the talent shortage in the Business Central ecosystem by aiming to bring new professionals to the community, by recruiting individuals with transferable skills from outside the ecosystem and providing them with training to become skilled BC professionals – developers or consultants.  I blogged about it here: BCTalent – Let’s bridge the talent gap together. There are also official links.

Last month – I was part of something so cool in the program, that I’d like to share.

A Red Carpet event for all learners that are part of the program with lots of interesting sessions .. and .. something I was part of that I’d like to highlight in this post…

Business Central Escape Rooms

A few months before, I got the opportunity to brainstorm on how we could make “testing knowledge” of the trainees more interesting at such an event.  An idea of “Escape Rooms” was thrown – and born.  Just think about it – 90 minutes in Business Central, where you need to gain access to different “rooms” by discovering and executing Business Central related “tasks” … IN Business Central.  We wanted two – what we called “venues”: a venue for consultants and a venue for developers.  Consultants had to do consultant tasks, developers had to develop .. . What is a venue, you may ask? Well – a venue could be seen as a set of rooms .

So AJ and me got to work, and we created a proof of concept of an app in Business Central.  The app makes it possible to define “rooms” and “tasks”, and can track the progress of the attendees on different things.  Like records created, documents posted, developments done, changed behavior in BC, .. .  So kind of like by using Business Central, the attendees advanced in the Escape Room by completing tasks and when completed enough tasks – completing rooms – and by completing all rooms – escape!

Kind of like a “real” Escape Room experience in Business Central.  “How cool is that”?

Now – to not reveal too much (I can’t share the actual content of the Escape Rooms to not spoil anything for future participants), let me show a few screenshots of the experience ..

As said, a venue is simply a set of rooms – and the attendees always had an overview of all rooms to be completed.  But not all rooms could be entered, of course, because you need to complete all tasks in a room before unlocking the next one.

Let me show you the introduction room – a room that was added to have an opportunity to show and experience what is possible in a room, and what was to be expected.

As you can see – just a Business Central page, but with lots of info on what to do.  An HTML description of the expectations in this Room (trust me – the description of the actual rooms was a bit more cryptic ), an indication of all the tasks yet to be completed – and also an opportunity to get hints and even to get the complete solution after a certain amount of time.  Just for people when they would really be stuck, to be able to continue and advance to the next room.

Next, it’s basically just a matter of doing what is expected: creating records, developing things – en the system will “notice” and notify you when tasks are complete by notifying you:

Or when you completed the entire room, there was even a badge you have earned!

The system keeps track of just about everything: how long it took anyone to complete tasks, which tasks, what hints were taken, and so much more.  All with .. drumroll .. telemetry! Duh..

I built some dashboards in Azure Data Explorer that kind of shows progress on different things – kind of like a leaderboard (but actually not intended to be ).

We had quite some participants, and all were very eager and dedicated to “escape” .. so much fun :-).

Some technical goodies

May be some technical things that are worth mentioning. 

First of all: the solution is a framework-app with a bunch of interfaces, and then every “venue” is an app that kind of implements the framework’s interfaces to become a set of rooms and tasks.

And sure – I might have overdone it a bit on the interfaces.  Or that’s at least the feedback I got back from Arend-Jan .  Sure – things could have been done better and simpler – but it is what it is .  I have an interface for just about every entity:

Like one example:

That also means: every task, every room – needs to have an implementation codeunit. The nice thing though, is that all of these are pretty much designed the same way, and AI is really good wiath that.  So I hope that designing any new venues will become easier since we already have quite some examples already .. ;-).

As I said, the system is “self evaluating” – and we simply do that by using events.  When a task is to create a customer, we simply subscribe to the OnAfterInsert to see if that is done – and if so, we set the task to completed!

But we can work with a lot more – even with test-codeunits to really test if the behavior is like it has to be. It all depends a bit on what the task is, but there are many ways to test certain things: you can test if fields exist, or if behavior is like it’s supposed to be, .. .

Another nice thing: to be able to decently show the instructions and solutions, we decided to be able to work with HTML resource files.

Real HTML files, very editable in VSCode, that we simply load in code with the fairly new “GetResource”-capabilities:

There is a lot more. I hope at some point all this (the framework) will become available – and you’ll be able to use this for yourself, your interviews, your internal testing or training, .. whatever! Lots of possibilities!

Which brings us to …

Future plans

I can’t share more about this, simply because it’s not mine :-).  The entire project was quite some work – but it also has quite some potential, and you’ll see some opportunities in the future where this will pop up.  Not only by future Microsoft events like this Red Carpet, but also at conventions and such. May be even already at Directions EMEA – who knows ;-).  I even see opportunities for you, ISVs, to be able to download the framework app and create your own rooms for your own products.  It’s fun, it’s addictive, it’s challenging .. . Who knows – one day .. .

Original Post https://www.waldo.be/2025/07/25/bctalent-escape-rooms/