During two days, sessions were held about the most divers subjects during which AI, in the form of Copilot, was an often recurring theme from the very first slide of the Opening Keynotes presentation.
Several trends are clearly visible in the latest developments in BC:
- Improving the User Experience by features like the integration with Copilot, extension of the Tooltip functionality, error message collection, more information with an error message and even the suggestion of actions to correct errors.
- The development of software in Visual Studio Code steadily meets Object Oriented Programming, for instance by using Interfaces and Namespaces as customary in languages like C#.
- New tools like Page Scripting.
Improving the User Experience
With the extensive integration of Copilot in the Dynamics BC Client, Microsoft makes large steps to enhance the simplicity and usability of BC. One of the demonstrations involved the process of transferring an email in which a customer mentions interest in purchasing a certain category of items into a Sales Quote with just a few simple steps.
Collecting Error messages simplifies the workload of an accountant posting transactions. Instead of handling data related errors in lines to post one by one, all errors can be collected. Using a list page, a user can choose to execute a system suggested action to correct all errors at once.
Development of software
Some new features may be familiar for the software developer also working in .NET. Namespaces facilitate the grouping of objects and even using the same object name more then once in one extension app. This might be a useful work- around for the 30 character limit for BC object names with logical naming. Interfaces provide an option to implement multiple implementations of specific blocks of code.
A lot of features under the hood of BC are modified again, such as the table locking mechanism. Testfield notifications can automatically be enhanced with an option to navigate directly to the incorrect field from within the error message.
New tools
Page Scripting facilitates the recording of actions by a user and even provides validation to verify the value of certain fields after executing the script. This can be used to include a reproductive script in a support call so a service or software engineer can exactly reproduce the steps taken by the customer. But also automated testing can be realised using this tool.
2-Controlware experience
An event in Belgium would not be complete by just delivering the acknowledgement with new Dynamics BC Features. After the first sessions day, the attendees could get familiar with a small but interesting part of the extensive Belgian assortment of beers and accompanying dishes in order to pleasantly chat and network with fellow engineers from Europe and even beyond.
BC TechDays 2024 was a very successful event on which we gained a lot of inspiration to further enrich and update our Field Security, Field Validation and Inventory Reconciliation apps with the latest developments offered by Microsoft.
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