Highlighting posts and resources from the Business Central development community — April 12–April 18, 2026
The week after BC28 GA brought a focused set of practical AL deep-dives. Stefano Demiliani put the new native SFTP Client codeunit through its paces, Duilio Tacconi recapped what changed for performance (headlined by Enable/Disable Indexes from the UI), and Steven Renders walked through the new Word add-in, Table Builder, layout lifecycle states, and 36 new document APIs in BC28. Javi Armesto introduced BC-Bench, Microsoft’s new open-source benchmarking framework that runs coding agents against 101 real BCApps bugs, and Gerardo Rentería shipped a VS Code extension that fails the build when required .xlf translations are missing.
Recent Posts (April 12–18, 2026)
➡️ 1. Dynamics 365 Business Central: Using SFTP from AL (the Native Way)
📇 Author: Stefano Demiliani
🗓️ Date: April 13, 2026
🌎 Link: demiliani.com
📝 Summary: BC28 ships a new SFTP Client module in the System Application — built on SSH.NET — that lets AL code talk to SFTP servers without HttpClient gymnastics or an Azure Function bridge. Stefano walks through the supported authentication modes (username/password, private key with and without passphrase), why you must register the server fingerprint before connecting, and shows the core SFTPClient methods for uploading, downloading via GetFileAsStream, listing files, and deleting — with a reminder that connections are stateful so Disconnect() matters.
➡️ 2. Dynamics 365 Business Central 2026 Wave 1: What’s New in Performance
📇 Author: Duilio Tacconi
🗓️ Date: April 17, 2026
🌎 Link: duiliotacconi.com
📝 Summary: Duilio’s annual performance roundup ranks BC28 third on his historical impact list, behind only the 2025 “Armageddon” releases. The headline feature: Enable/Disable Indexes from the client UI (per company or all companies) on the Table Information page — a CSIDE-era capability finally back, this time in production. Also covered: optimized Base64 conversions, the MCP-for-Troubleshooting endpoint, scheduled performance profiler additions, and sqlServerSessionId now appearing in more telemetry signals alongside sqlStatement.
➡️ 3. Quick Tip: BC28 — What Is New in Document Reporting
📇 Author: Steven Renders
🗓️ Date: April 13, 2026
🌎 Link: thinkaboutit.be
📝 Summary: A practical recap of every reporting change in BC28. The redesigned Word add-in adds search, tooltips, dark mode, and double-click insert; the new Table Builder preview generates a fully wired repeater (header + columns + footer + WordMergeDataItem) from a single dialog. Layout Lifecycle Status (Draft / Pending Approval / Approved / Retired) hides non-approved user-defined layouts from the request page, a new Default Language Code on Company Information closes the multilingual gap, and 36 new document API endpoints cover sales, purchasing, inventory, and assembly — including blanket orders, archives, and direct transfers.
➡️ 4. BC-Bench (I): What Is It?
📇 Author: Javi Armesto
🗓️ Date: April 16, 2026
🌎 Link: techspheredynamics.com
📝 Summary: Microsoft has open-sourced BC-Bench, an SWE-Bench–style benchmark for AI coding agents on Business Central. The dataset contains 101 real bugs from BCApps and NAV — each with reproduction steps, the base commit, the gold patch, and the test patch — and the pipeline compiles, runs the agent’s fix, and reports a binary pass/fail in a BC container. Four independent levers (prompts, custom instructions, modular skills, agent definitions) make experiments reproducible. Current leaderboard: 40–60% resolution depending on agent, model, and configuration, with custom instructions adding a measurable 10–18 percentage points.
➡️ 5. Never Publish an AL Extension with Missing Translations Again
📇 Author: Gerardo Rentería
🗓️ Date: April 16, 2026
🌎 Link: gerardorenteria.blog
📝 Summary: AL produces g.xlf automatically, but nothing forces a build to fail when a required language file (or one of its regional variants like es-ES_tradnl, fr-CH) is missing. Gerardo’s new AL Translation Requirements VS Code extension fixes that gap with a settings-driven contract: declare alTranslationRequirements.required and an equivalents mapping, then run Validate to fail on missing/empty <target> elements or needs-translation states, and Sync Equivalents to scaffold the variant .xlf files from the base language. Includes inline highlighting on <trans-unit> rows that need attention.
Community Resources
Official Resources
GitHub Repositories
- microsoft/BCApps – Repository for collaboration on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central applications.
- microsoft/BCTech – Business Central technology samples.
- microsoft/ALAppExtensions – Repository for collaboration on Microsoft AL application add-on and localization extensions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
- microsoft/AL – Home of the Dynamics 365 Business Central AL Language extension for Visual Studio Code.
- StefanMaron/MSDyn365BC.Code.History – Contains the Microsoft Business Central Code. Updated each month.
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Note: This review is compiled from publicly available blog posts and community resources. Links to external blog posts are provided for your information only and do not constitute endorsement or validation of their content. Publication information and availability are subject to change. Always verify information against official documentation for production use.