The Future of BC Repositories

I would like to talk today about the future of the Business Central ecosystem, and more specifically about what will happen with repositories. This is very important and relevant information if you work in the ecosystem. I will say right away that the changes are very significant and positive!

BCApps

The most important news is what Jesper presented at Directions and recently reminded everyone about once again on LinkedIn. It is about BCApps, the repository that originally contained the System Application, and later Business Foundation as well.

Now, this repository will also contain the Base Application with all country versions, every Microsoft first-party app, and all developer tools such as the Test Framework and Performance Toolkit.

Essentially, this repository will become the main point of interaction between the community and Business Central open source.

Even more than that, it looks like Microsoft will also be working in this repository together with partners.

Now, we have single open home for everything regarding development on Business Central platform.

This is a huge achievement, and as Jesper noted, many people have been working on it for the last decade. And this is only the beginning.

Much more is planned for the future, including ideas around deep integration of AI agents into the structure of this repository to automate many actions. It will be very interesting to see where this leads.

See more here: https://github.com/microsoft/BCApps

BC Quality

The next important piece of news concerns a completely new repository: BC Quality. This repository contains a knowledge base for both people and agents related to development on the Business Central platform.

This repository was also created so that AI agents can perform higher-quality code reviews of your AL code. It will bring together all the most important nuances and best practices for development.

All the information is stored in .md format and includes the necessary AI skills for interaction, so both agents and people can read and use this information.

I am already using this repository in my work, and the result is impressive. I may write in more detail about the practical use of this repository a bit later. But in short, I use BC Quality for code review as a separate step together with manual / general code review. I already briefly mentioned this in my previous article.

See more here: https://github.com/microsoft/BCQuality

ALguidelines

So what will happen to ALguidelines — the repository that describes best practices and patterns for working with AL?

Overall, this repository has been developed more by the community than by Microsoft. In addition, it was written only for people, not for agents. Because of that, the style and content of this repository are different from BC Quality.

In any case, ALguidelines will still exist and continue to evolve. It may possibly transform a bit, considering the situation with BC Quality and Agentic AI.

In addition, many articles from ALguidelines will also be added to BC Quality after review and formatting. As far as I understand, Jeremy is currently working on this.

See more here: https://github.com/microsoft/alguidelines