Dynamics Business Central / NAV Developer Digest - Vol. 553

ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. This week’s volume includes building a high-functioning development team, the problem of bringing AI into the real world, and getting symbols without having a BC instance running.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central community, comprising developers, project managers, and consultants, collaborates across 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.

Building development teams focused on quality

After facilitating a panel session at Directions North America in April, Matt Traxinger decided to launch a new series focused on the question, “How do you build a team that writes good software consistently, in an industry where almost everything rewards shipping and almost nothing rewards structure?”

The problem with many software projects, especially those that center on a niche product and development environment like Business Central, is that developers, including those at Microsoft, have made technical decisions based on reasonable information at the time that have led to development constraints further down the line. Every developer makes these types of decisions, and they are not always wrong.

As Traxinger puts it, “The question is whether those decisions, rational when they were made, still make sense now that the constraints have shifted. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it’s more uncomfortable than that.”

The series will attempt to go beyond the technical questions and best practices and instead focus on “how do you build a team that writes good software consistently; how do you create conditions where quality is the default; and hold open the possibility that some of what looks like a problem is actually a reasonable adaptation to circumstances that haven’t changed as much as they appear to have.”

Check out Matt’s first installment, We Know What the Problems Are, on LinkedIn.

An LLM is NOT all there is to AI

In a recent blog post, Stefano Demiliani takes a hard look at bringing AI into the real world. Demiliani quotes these disturbing statistics:

• Around 60/70% of enterprise AI projects fail.
• Only around 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration.
• The average organization scrapped around 40% of AI proofs of concept before they reached production.

These statistics reveal a problem with the way AI projects are developed. Demiliani stresses that customers are running a business – they don’t want a demo or proof-of-concept, they want a reliable, auditable product.

As he puts it, “[Customers] care about ROI, not about using the latest fancy AI tools. Does this AI system make them money, save them time, or reduce risk?”

He offers a list of what customers should be able to expect from an AI project:

• Respects their data governance policies and security boundaries.
• Integrates with existing systems that predate modern cloud architecture.
• Handles edge cases, exceptions, and domain-specific logic that no prompt can address.
• Operates reliably at scale, not as a prototype that works once.
• Logs decisions, maintains audit trails, and supports compliance requirements.
• Behaves consistently even when the LLM’s behavior drifts.

Demiliani goes on to discuss how developers can build reliable AI agents for their customers.

Read more in his blog, Why Customer’s AI project fail? The gap between hype and reality.

NuGet: Get symbols without having a BC instance running

New in the AL tools in Visual Studio is NuGet, a way to get symbols without a Business Central instance running.

Using the command, AL: Download Symbols from Global Sources, developers can download symbols directly from public NuGet feeds from Microsoft or from custom feeds.

In addition, the AL.symbolsCountryRegion setting allows you to provide localization (for example, us for the U.S., ca for Canada, de for Germany, or w1 for worldwide) instead of relying on the connected tenant’s localization.

This new feature makes it easier for developers to download symbols that match your current Business Central version.

To learn more, read the blog, Download Symbols From a NuGet Feed, by Brad Prendergast, or watch Erik Hougaard’s video, Get Your Symbols via NuGet like a Pro!

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 by Cherry Bekaert for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

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