• Developing for BC on Mac

    I’ve never owned a Mac; having grown up on DOS and .NET, it’s always felt like an ‘exotic’ system to me. Yet, never say never! In a way, AI has shifted the hardware and software landscape, demanding higher performance for anyone wanting to run LLMs locally. I won’t bore you with debates on how Silicon…

  • AI on the edge

    I’ve always believed that to truly master any technology, you have to understand what’s happening “behind the scenes.” You need to know what moves information from point A to point B and how the “machine” actually processes data. Lately, Artificial Intelligence has sparked such a massive wave of excitement in such a short time that…

  • Data Quality

    A few days ago, I came across a LinkedIn post featuring a BI environment where the author was interacting via AI prompts. Nothing new, except the data source was Business Central. Scrolling through, I noticed the database was named “BC-Replica”. Interesting. Repicate data from On Premises From a BI perspective, this is a “lucky” scenario…

  • Batch Activities

    Few years ago, during one technical session of Directions, someone said: “Job Queues are old”, “We discourage to use them intensively”, “Use external scheduler or subscriptions to trigger events, avoid polling”. Yeah, but in a high concurrency environment, Job Queues are irreplaceable, and I do not know a better method to serialize operations. Concurrency Improvements…

  • Executing SQL in Business Central SaaS

    As you know, it’s not possible to execute SQL in the SaaS version of Business Central. “It’s to preserve the database!” someone will say. “It’s a serious lack!” I say. Anyway, I recently need to update thousands of rows in the SaaS, merging results from several tables. A typical activity that takes not more than…

  • The real performance of Cloud

    🚀 2025 A.D. the artificial intelligence outperforms humans, enormous data centers across the world consume more and more energy and provide data processing at the speed of light A few years ago a customer with a lot of stores and Business Central On Premises was exhausted about posting performances and wanted to go in the…

  • BC is slow, call the DBA!

    “BC is slow, call the DBA!” I heard this sentence many and many times. So, can the DBA make the difference in Business Central performance issues? In the Cloud: certainly no, because the database is not accessible. On Premises: maybe. If “playing” with hardware, indexes and optimizations can give +10% of speed, “working” with code…

  • Sharing “myBrayns”

    Last year was very intensive for me, writing an entire new code base for Microsoft Business Central plus several companion tool for various integrations. This code base was specifically designed for customers that run distribution or retail business. The sofware has been tested with many (and complex 😅) pharmaceutical customers. “Experience” is the name of…

  • Real AI: from demand forecasting to automatic orders

    Hey Copilot, please predict sales for the next four weeks, net them by inventory and send required purchase orders to the vendors. Thank you! Wow! This is a common wish of many of my customers, that employ dozen of buyers to analyze sales, predict and place orders every day. Numbers from a real scenario: To…

  • Hey Copilot: please print my label

    No, Copilot has nothing to do with this post 😅 but it makes me smile how sometimes simple things becomes hard. Such printing (automatically) a label from a cloud ERP. Business Central approach Since 2020, Microsoft added “non-interactive printing in the cloud” allowing batches (job queues) to automatically print documents. This is possibile in two…

  • Unaware laggards

    Last week was the time for “Directions for Partners”, a yearly conference for Business Central professionals, organized in EMEA and ASIA. There was a lot of attendees like never before! Leaving out technology, “Directions” showed the world how much the Business Central community is strong and maybe stronger than ever. Simply: the product works great!…

  • Synchronization Pattern

    Many times I wrote about “decoupling” and “integration” between Business Central and other systems, now I want to share my approach to data synchronization. Let’s take a third party WMS system as an example. These are the requirements: We need to replicate from BC to WMS, as fast as possible, these tables: At the end…

  • Old but gold Intranet

    I started designing Intranets many (and many 😅) years ago and, despite new technological stuffs, these sites are hard to die. An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. An organization-wide intranet can…

  • “Fast Track” Migrations

    In the past weeks I’m talking with some colleagues about the “best way” to do a successful migration from NAV to Business Central. Since there is not a “best way” 😅 I’m tried to identify the key factors of a migration through quadrant analysis. From the “data” point of view, the limits are: From the…

  • Less Dev, More Ops

    Last monday I received a support request by a customer: All number series are wrong! New orders are taking 2022 numbers and posted invoices 2023 ones! WTF 🤯 I immediately thought it was a failure of someone of my APPs. But no: even after disinstallation of all APPs the issue persisted. Customer has no changed…

  • Accounting reconciliation with Copilot

    Few months ago, Microsoft announced “Bank account reconciliation with Copilot” an exciting new feature for Business Central. Bookkeepers in SMB organizations need to import bank statements and reconcile transactions with their bank ledger entries, making sure all transactions are accounted for. While Business Central already reduces effort through rule-based transaction matching, the residual work to…

  • V24, here you go!

    Last 5th of April, Microsoft released Business Central 2024 wave 1 (V24) for On Premises environments. As known, who use BC in Cloud don’t have to worry about upgrading: Microsoft will do it automatically. In the last post I made some suggestions about “fast-upgrade” On Premises with Cumulative Updates. Now I want to share with…

  • Update Business Central on premise in minutes!

    Every month Microsoft releases a Cumulative Update for Business Central and two times per year a new major version is released (“wave 1” in April and “wave 2” in October). These new versions are automatically installed in the Cloud: customers that use the SaaS version of BC have nothing to do to keep their system…

  • “AppDestination”

    In these weeks I’m wondering what will be the evolution of Business Central AppSource. I had already spoken about the issues working with third party APPs with closed source (IP Rights and Open Source) and with V24 Microsoft will take a step forward: For resellers who develop per-tenant extensions for customers, or for publishers who…

  • Yet another post about decoupling

    Some weeks ago, Stefano Demiliani wrote an interesting post about “decoupling” (“Decoupling”: the misterious word for many Dynamics 365 Business Central partners. – Stefano Demiliani). He concluded: And for you, Dynamics 365 Business Central PARTNERS: let’s not discredit the system by saying untrue things. There are no technological barriers today that could block a move…

  • One month at the speed of light

    In these days I’m working on a complex migration from NAV to BC of a pharmaceutical environment. The customer is satified by NAV, the processes are very standardized and the database was kept clean, with no excess of coding in the base application. So, why the migration is complex? Due performance issues! NAV and SQL…

  • IP Rights and Open Source

    Probably you noticed that in the last source files of Microsoft Business Central, the Open Source MIT license appeared: The Business Central source code (and previous the NAV source code) has always been open, but is it the same for Partner APPs? Resource exposure policy settings Microsoft says: When you develop an extension, your code…

  • The same companion table

    Waiting for the 2023 Wave 2 release of Dynamics 365 BC, I want to share some considerations with you about the Extensions data model. Here is what we are expecting from Microsoft: This release focuses on optimizing an essential part of the data stack in the Business Central server: The data model for table extensions.…

  • Old blog posts in translation…

    Be patient: I’m translating the old blog posts in English. 🙂

  • Goodbye C/SIDE, welcome AL!

    It was a long journey that led to the development of “Extensions V2” for Dynamics NAV. Those who have tried with events and then with the first extensions will remember the many attempts to make NAV “modular”, which by its nature is not “modular”. Today, however, the wait is over and already with NAV 2018…

  • Move SQL databases from one server to another

    If you have many databases, SQL Agent jobs, and logins with special permissions, moving an instance of SQL Server from one server to another can take a long time. However, keeping the database engine updated is important and it is not always possible to do it on the same server, ad example due to the…