Dynamics 365 Business Central: April 2019 release wave features

Microsoft has revealed to the general public the new Dynamics 365 Business Central features planned to be released in the April 2019 wave (from April through September 2019). Here a quick summary of what to attend (so be prepared ):

• Web experience improvements:
  • New shortcuts
  • Work date settings
  • Company indicator
  • Totals for lists
  • Improved search
  • Advanced personalization experience
  • Page inspector: an “advanced zoom feature” Depending on the page you are inspecting, some or all of the following is displayed:
    • The page or page part name and identifier.
    • The underlying table name and identifier.
    • The entire set of table fields for the current record, including their caption, value, field identifier, primary key indicator, and which extension has introduced them.
    • Which extensions extend the page or the underlying table.
    • Which filters are currently applied to the table.
• Platform improvements:
  • Database tuning
  • Server resources optimized for fast user interaction
  • On-demand page elements loading
  • Security improvements
  • Tenant upgrade policy improvements for maximum customer’s availability
  • Release candidates of new application versions will be available in sandbox environments. Tenant administrators and ISVs can upgrade a sandbox environment to the new release candidate version, or create a new sandbox environment on the new version. This will allow administrators and ISVs to do testing, verify extension compatibility, and review new application  functionality in a sandbox environment prior to the upgrade happening in the production environment .
  • Possibility to manually upload extensions directly to the sandbox environment
  • New automated service that validates per-tenant extensions against upcoming versions of the base application and notifies the admins/developers when an incompatibility is found
  • Notifications sent to admins when a new version of an installed AppSource app is available. The administrator can then select to upgrade the app from the extension management page on their schedule
  • Intelligent Cloud enhancements: now a data synch from NAV 2018 is fully supported. Dynamics NAV 2018 customers can replicate virtually all on-premises tables to their Business Central cloud tenant, except for customized tables
  • SmartList Designer: it will enable users to create new queries or modify existing queries.
• Application enhancements:
  • Standard Name and Description fields are now 100 chars (previously 50)
  • You can now select multiple items at once from the items list to add to sales or purchase documents
  • When you enter an item that does not exist on a sales line, you are prompted to either create a new item card or select an existing item (you can skip this via a setup)
  • When a duplicate customer or vendor record is created by mistake, you can now merge such duplicate records to a single record
  • Bulk import of item pictures (zip file)
  • Customer and Vendor statistics factbox improved with payment details
  • Saved list views + development model for creating list views via AL code
  • Improved notes and links
  • Quick Entry feature for repetitive data entry ( It changes the behavior of the Enter key to be different from the Tab key, moving the focus to the next Quick Entry field across the page and skipping over non-essential fields )
  • Auto-saving indicator (it shows an indication about the save state of a record, such as Saving, Saved, Not saved):

• • Dynamics 365 for Sales integration improved

• Development enhancements:
  • Base application as an app: all base code will be translated into AL code. The base app is splitted into a system app and a dependent app on top of that,  compiled in AL using Visual Studio Code:
    
  • AL base code can be managed directly via Visual Studio Code (remember that the April ’19 release is based on C/AL and C/SIDE, and plans are on track to
    switch to AL and Visual Studio Code as the supported platform for new releases within 12-24 months from our October ’18 release):

• • In-client designer no longer automatically adds dependencies to all deployed extensions (finally!!)
  • Improved support for large AL projects
  • Possibility to attach the debugger to already running client sessions
  • Visual Studio Code Code actions support
  • API improvements (and out of beta)