Dynamics Business Central / NAV Developer Digest - Vol. 529
ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. This week’s volume includes the new Sales Order Agent in BC 2025 Wave 1, new capabilities in the IncStr method, managing sessions using the Admin Center, and BcContainerHelper stops working unexpectedly.
The Dynamics 365 Business Central community, consisting of developers, project managers, and consultants, collaborates across various platforms to share valuable insights. At ArcherPoint, we greatly value their dedication and expertise. To ensure widespread access to this technical knowledge, we created Developer Digest.
Introducing the Sales Order Agent in Business Central 2025 Wave 1
Microsoft is including the Sales Order Agent in Business Central 2025 Wave 1 (v26) to help users automate the capture of sales orders from email. The agent uses AI to analyze a customer request that arrives via email, locates that customer in Business Central, verifies missing information, then determines product availability and follows up with a sales quote.
This represents the first of many other agents Microsoft plans to add to the Business Central platform.
Because the Sales Order Agent uses the Microsoft Copilot Studio messages, there will be a charge assessed for the AI interactions. However, keep in mind that by automating these sales interactions, the Sales Order Agent will save your staff the time spent performing non-essential work and be able to focus more on the needs of your customers.
In his blog, Dynamics 365 Business Central agent capabilities: how much do they cost me?, Stefano Demiliani breaks down the cost using various example scenarios to give readers an idea of what these charges will look like.
New IncStr method adds versatility to incrementing string variables
For years, if you wanted to increment numbers in a string variable, you would use the IncStr method, which would increment or decrement the number by one. While this worked well for number series, incrementing a number by more than one required custom logic.
The new overload of the IncStr method allows developers to increase or decrease a number in a string variable by an arbitrary amount.
Saurav Dhyani’s blog, Optimizing AL Code with the New IncStr Overload in Business Central 2025, explains and provides practical examples.
Managing sessions using the Admin Center
Sometimes, processes take over the available resources and slow down the entire system. This might be due to running complex reports, database locks, or stuck processes. The Admin Center lets you navigate different environments and see the running sessions. There, you can cancel sessions or even restart the environment.
Waldo discusses using the Admin Center to manage sessions and shares some best practices when using the Admin Center.
Check out his blog, Troubleshooting Series – Ep2 – Admin Center – Sessions, for more.
This is a follow-up to his previous blog, Troubleshooting Series – Ep1 – Admin Center – Service Health.
BcContainerHelper stops working unexpectedly
Apparently, we weren’t the only ones surprised by this one:
You might have received the error, “Error querying artifacts. Error message was the remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.”
Many developers reported this issue on May 1. The typical reaction has been something like, “All our pipelines are down because the URL to download bccontainerhelper has changed, and it is not working.”
Usually, when something like this happens, it’s because of one of three things: a real Azure outage, a change in Azure DevOps, or a change in BcContainerHelper. This time it was the last one.
It turns out that the download URL for BcContainerHelper was deprecated without warning, which broke the pipeline runs.
According to Freddy K on GitHub, “On May 1, 2025, the storage accounts used to store Business Central artifacts will no longer be searchable (ListBlobs will be denied), meaning that all older versions of BcContainerHelper will stop working. The versions after v6.1 use an index for locating artifacts, which is also much faster – another reason for using the latest.”
Check out the discussion on GitHub, All BcContainerHelper versions prior to v6.1 won’t work after May 1st 2025 #3903.
Are you interested in Dynamics NAV and Business Central development? Check out our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.
Read “How To” blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.