What's new in AL Business Central 2025 release

 

What’s New in AL Business Central 2025: Key Updates and Enhancements

Microsoft’s 2025 release of AL for Business Central brings exciting improvements for developers and businesses alike. This update focuses on performance optimization, enhanced AL language capabilities, and better integration options to streamline development and customization. Expect new debugging tools, improved data handling, and expanded APIs that make extending Business Central more powerful and efficient.

Here are some key snippets from the announcement highlighting the changes.(*Screenshots below are from the announcement)

Ability to add resource folder and access them in AL

Limitations and enhancements related to the resource folder in AL development. Here are the key points:  

• Restricted File Types– The resource folder now has stricter validation, allowing only specific file types to be included.  
• Size Limitations – There may be new constraints on the maximum file size to improve performance and reduce deployment overhead.  
• Access Restrictions – Resources within the folder might have more controlled access, limiting how they can be referenced in AL code.  
• Deployment Impact – Changes in the resource folder handling could affect extensions relying on large assets, requiring developers to adjust their packaging strategy.  

Ability to overwrite CardPageID

New PageType - UserControlHost

This new page type for example can be used for PowerBI report, webpage 

• Tooltip is now added to Report.
• ExcelLayoutMultipleDataSheet: allow to split data into multiple sheet

New properties are added to Request Page

In the Role Explorer, the "About Text" and "About Title" are inherited from the report itself

In this release, you can obsolete report layout 

New triggers are added and also TargetFormat is added

User can view report directly without have to download it using ViewFromStream

GetURL with a specific layout type

Added Callstack function without throwing an exception first

Added keyword "Continue" in the loop in order to skip the loop and go straight to the next iteration. This make the code more readable and easy to understand

Ability to add multi-lines String using "@" 

Added "ToText" similar to "Format"

In Json object, a new "GetText" is added to quickly access the data without goes through JsonToken and JsonValue. You can read more about this here https://dara365.blogspot.com/2025/03/bcv26-json-data-new-features.html

Added ability to read and write YAML

Added ability to test HttpOutboundHandler without calling the third party endpoint directly

Now you can specify to not use the Certificate validation and this is not recommend to be used in Production, for testing purpose only.

There are plenty of other updates—be sure to check the ChangeLog for full details. What’s your favorite feature in this release?