New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2: Remove Friction When Working With External App Dependencies

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2.

The 12th of the new functionality in the Development section is remove friction when working with external app dependencies.

Resellers who develop per-tenant extensions for customers and publishers who create AppSource apps commonly build on the work of other publishers, and thereby take a dependency on these. In order to develop or test, they need access to the AppSource apps they depend on.

Today, this involves a tedious manual process where resellers and publishers with dependencies must contact publishers owning the applications they depend on and ask for symbols to develop against or runtime packages to test with. This is not only required once, but continuously as new versions of the Business Central first-party applications and the publishers’ applications emerge, making the process time-consuming and error-prone.

In this version Microsoft plan to unblock developing and compiling against external applications and test in online sandboxes.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Oct 2024
General Availability: Oct 2024

Feature Details

In this release Microsoft add support for resellers and publishers to download symbols for AppSource applications to develop against, providing a public NuGet feed with packages containing symbols for AppSource applications. If you are using AL-Go for GitHub, then it will automatically locate and download these symbols during the build. You can also take advantage of AL-Go for GitHub to run tests in online sandboxes.

My Opinion

This sounds like a very useful enhancement, although I’m not too involved on the development side of Business Central.