Microsoft Dynamics 365 2022 Release Wave 2 plan for Business Central

You cannot have missed it: the “2022 Release Wave 2” plans are out!  There have been blogs, there have been tweets, and yes, Erik Hougaard already did a video about it as well of course – and as I always do – I’ll go over the plan myself, focused mostly on the Business Central part – and within that focus, a focus on the tech part ;-).  And this time .. In the current state of the plans .. It seems to be a very limited focus ..

Microsoft Docs

You have a complete overview on Microsoft Docs.  And that for all Microsoft Dynamics 365 – and obviously also specifically for Busines Central.  Here are some links – they probably will be updated over the upcoming months – I won’t do that, just that you know ;-):

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 2022 release wave 2 plan overview
• Overview of Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 release wave 2
• New and planned features for Dynamics 365 Business Central, 2022 release wave 2

As always, I’ll put all the references concerning Business Central into this blogpost – at least the ones I found at the time of writing.. .

What I’m most looking forward to

To start with: Switch companies across environments

As an image tells more than a thousand words – this is what you might be able to get:

Switching companies (across all our environments) made easy.  FOR SURE I’m looking forward to that.  I think we all do.

And to end with: Choose the report layout on request page

I like this one a lot.  I think it gives “report layouts” so much more love.  Nice one!

And this is it, I’m afraid.  From the entire list, this is basically it.  Can’t say I’m overly ecstatic of what’s coming. It’s all good and understandable – but I’m not blown away. Yet ;-).  It doesn’t seem to be a big release I guess .. at least from my subjective opinion (as I’m mostly focused on tech stuff anyway) ;-).

Let’s list all the other points here as well ..

Development

Erik Hougaard had a remark that I totally missed that in the overview of the “development” section, Microsoft stated:

“In this release wave, we continue the investment in our Visual Studio Code experience by adding visual abstractions on top of AL code”

Microsoft

Nice catch – and from the list below, there isn’t really anything that refers to it – so I guess that’s something that will be added to the plans at some point?  (or the statement will be removed? 😉 ).

• Promoted action groups and action references – as such, this is kind of a refactoring of the promotion-situation, which isn’t very flexible at the moment – but with a backwards compatibility (for now?) for how it works now: a page just needs to use the new system, or the old system – not mixed.  How it will look exactly in code, we don’t know yet – so we’ll have to wait.
• Use ByRef, XmlPort parameters in OData – in SOAP, you could create a codeunit-webservice, and then pass an XMLport to a parameter, which became an object.  Next release, we’ll be getting that option on Odata (obviously to make the shift from SOAP to ODATA easier).  And who knows – we’ll be able to pass/work with JsonObject as well (as Erik .
• Access database row version from AL code – Not sure what I’d be using it for, to be honest.  May be for interface-scenarios, I don’t now.. . 
• Write faster upgrade code – if I read it well: a better, more efficient way to create upgrade code to move data from one field to another, and/or from one table to the other.  Honestly – I have my 2 snippets for that, which is pretty easy to use, and pretty much cover all circumstances that I need, so I’m not really sure what they try to solve here.

Reporting

• Use new Excel report datasets – Microsoft using their own new feature.. .
• Run, send reports from the request page – I guess that’s a good thing to be able to send to the inbox from the request page.. . 
• Choose the report layout on request page

OnBoarding

• New field descriptions improve clarity
• Easily access setup pages for new apps – as such a new app.json setting to set up a Setup Page ID.  Makes sense for small apps, less voor monoliths (but who does that, right? ;-)).
• Easily find apps to connect to core services – interesting.  Not a single idea how that works.  Is it some kind of extension to the “recommended apps”?  Is it “search terms” we can set up?  Or some kind of pre-defined categories?  We’ll see..
• Easily install and set up new apps – When you read the description, it seems to be a better experience for installing an app, in stead of checking the deployment status.  Meh – don’t really care about it too much .. .

Governance & Administration

• Get more, better communications as admin
• Get more visibility into outages
• Restore deleted environments – pretty nice. Never needed it, but I can imagine that – when I need it – I’ll be greatful that it exist!
• Use service-to-service authentication with admin API – well, good!  It only makes sense to be able to access the admin API this way.

Productive with Microsoft 365

• Configure OneDrive integration – I’m going to look into that.  The one time I was looking into OneDrive was to be able to apply it to my own functionality, which seemed to be impossible (or I didn’t know how at that point in time ;-)).  May be this means there is more to it, and better extendable.  I don’t know.  It seems to only focus on Administrators better deciding what they want to enable though.. .
• Delegated admins can edit in Excel

Service and Platform

• Get Power BI reports on telemetry with one-click

Power Platform

I don’t have too much experience yet with anything but PowerShell – which I’m sure it’s not part of the Power Platform, so I don’t really have opinions here ;-).

• Personalize and design the Automate action group in the web client
• Power Apps and Power Automate support for document attachments
• Rely on personalization to show or hide Power BI parts on lists
• Try Power BI apps with dimensions

Application

• Better bank reconciliation for checks
• Extended text functionality for VAT clauses
• Financial reporting replaces account schedules
• New VAT Date field on documents and entries
• Reverse payment reconciliation journal entries
• Use multiple remit-to addresses for vendors

Country & Regional

The section on Docs states that mor than 50 precent of all countries worldwide are now covered with Business Central.  One word: WOW!  Nice job!

• Configurable and redesigned Intrastat solution
• Service declarations F01DGS for Belgium and Intrastat for Italy and France

User Experiences

• Legacy list views are hidden – NO clue what this is.  So I searched through Erik’s video, and he is in doubt as well.  Lol 🤣.
• Experience new UI design elements
• Switch companies across environments

What am I missing

Well – two things pop up in my head.

API testability

In many ways, API Testability is something that should be covered better than what we can do now.  A few MVP’s and Microsoft have been brainstorming a bit on how that could look like – like a simple way to call an API with a header that marks some kind of isolations, and get some kind of result to mark if it was successful – or a response in Json to assert the result.

Or ANYTHING that makes testability of API’s easier, and especially isolated (transactions) so that I don’t mess up my next tests with unexpected data and such.. .

It would solve a lot.  Just think about it.  Any third party application that integrates with your system relies on how your system behaves, while it gets updated every month.  Or even more – the “Power Push” that Microsoft is doing.  “Low code”, “No Code” stuff.  It all integrates with APIs.  We better get them as stable as at all possible, don’t you think? .. and testability helps! 

SQL queries in the profiler

Yeah, I’m still hooked to the AL profiler, and one thing I’d really would like to see is having SQL queries together with the AL code.  I know it’s hard to do a stable mapping between the AL statement and the actual SQL statement, but to be honest, I’d already be happy if it would be only correct 80% of the time.. .  It would be an awesome addition to analyze performance cases – also for SaaS.