Navision & Dynamics 365 Business Central

In this post, I propose to examine how good LLMs are for AL coding on real tasks. As an example, I will use a real task for the Data Editor that I have been putting off for quite a long time. For comparison, I selected the most powerful and popular models: Claude 4 Sonnet, GPT-5 High, Grok 4, and Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Creating high-performance reports is an essential skill for any Business Central developer. I’m sure many of you have run into slow reports, but what if I told you they’re slow mainly because of poor design? Today, I outline a set of techniques and tips that will help developers build truly high-performance reports.

As you have probably noticed, Business Central is actively integrating AI and providing developer tools for working with large language models. One of these tools is the new page type PromptDialog. I suggest exploring this page type along with the new AI interfaces using simple example: create Copilot for generating Payment Terms records.

Today I have a lot of news: a major update to Table Data Editor, a new logo, a website redesign, and a new domain. These changes took a lot of time and effort, and I hope you'll like them. But let's go over everything in order.

Recently, Microsoft has been doing a lot to improve Word reporting. However, Word reporting is still lagging behind, and many developers prefer working with RDL/RDLC. So, what is Word lacking, and can it ever become a viable reporting system? A logical question also arises: why put so much effort into improving Word when RDLC could be enhanced instead? I will attempt to answer these and other questions in this post.

When you've been blogging for several years, the articles you wrote long ago can become outdated and less relevant. This is a perfectly normal and natural process. "Here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere, you must run twice as fast as that." That's why I'm doing a summer cleaning of my old articles and projects to keep them up-to-date with current realities.

Have you heard about the addition of the ternary operator in AL? Some developers are happy, while others say that it is awful. In some ways, I am closer to those who believe that there is more harm than good in it. However, I still believe that the tool itself has a neutral connotation. It all depends on who uses it and how they do it. I want to thoroughly analyze the pros and cons of using the ternary operator with examples. Where it is worth using and where it is better never to use it.

I think integrating Sharepoint into Business Central is a fairly common request. The standard library already supports some level of Sharepoint/OneDrive integration out of the box, but it is quite limited. What if we need more advanced logic? In that case, we can use Sharepoint Interfaces from the System Application! But did you know that this will only work if the user has permissions on Sharepoint? Regardless of whether we are using Microsoft Entra Application, it all comes down to the authorization that Sharepoint Interfaces use by default. Let's dive in and understand this better.

In one of my series of posts, I examined Number Series and Number Sequences from a performance perspective. I am pleased to report that the situation has significantly improved starting from Business Central 24! I will focus on the cloud version.

It may seem like working with text is one of the simplest things to do. However, in reality, it is quite a deep topic and not as easy as it may appear at first glance. In this article, we will cover the main approaches to working with text, as well as discuss the issue of text encoding.

I think Friday is the perfect day to break Business Central! Very dangerous, do not repeat this on Production!

ShortCutKey is a fairly well-known property for actions in Business Central. But did you know about such a unique ShortCutKey as Return? Let's talk about it.

Previously, we thought that in the future robots would sweep the streets while humans engaged in creative activities. Now the future has arrived, but it's the robots that are being creative, and humans are sweeping the streets. This text is unusual for me. Typically, I write about the technical aspects of Business Central, preferring to use programming languages and technical analysis. This article, however, will be more of a general reflection on my view of AI as a whole.

Business Central is partially an open-source product and anyone can contribute to the app. Today I will tell you how to do it and what is specifically available. To give an example, I will show how to contribute to the System Application.

Sometimes we need to know the current CallStack in the code, but what if we only have GetLastErrorCallStack and we don't have any error?

This is a continuation of the discussion of Number Series and Number Sequence. This time we will be testing in Cloud Business Central. We will also encounter unexpected results and try to understand the reasons. We will do SQL statement analysis as well.

It is fairly common practice to use Number Series to generate a key field value for a table in Business Central. This is very convenient, but do you know how slow it is? Let's try to look at examples and performance measurements, talk about Number Series and Allow Gaps, as well as Number Sequence.