- Feature
- Track AL compiler diagnostics in automated builds
- Availability
- Generally available (October 2026)
- Industry focus
- Telecoms resellers and IT solution providers
Telecoms resellers and IT solution providers run complicated Business Central systems. Recurring billing for connectivity and licences, hardware sales, managed services contracts and integrations with carrier and distributor portals all depend on custom extensions. Those extensions grow with every new product. Business Central 29.0 helps teams keep track of whether that code is getting healthier or worse.
The industry challenge
A typical reseller might have several extensions in one Business Central workspace:
- A recurring billing engine for lines, bundles and licences
- An integration with a distributor's ordering and pricing feed
- A provisioning link to carrier portals
- Custom reports for commissions and margin by product family
Every build of these extensions produces compiler and analyzer output: errors, warnings and code-quality hints. In practice, most of that information is seen once on a developer's screen and then lost. Nobody can answer simple questions. Are warnings going up or down? Which extension has the most problems? Did last month's changes make things worse?
Without that visibility, technical debt builds up quietly until an upgrade or a major change exposes it.
What Microsoft delivered in Business Central 29.0
According to Microsoft, ALTool workspace builds can now write structured compiler error logs for each project. Automated systems can keep those logs, analyze them and use them to track code quality.
Microsoft says development teams can retain structured compiler and analyzer results from workspace builds. That makes it easier to spot code-quality regressions and to feed AL diagnostics into automated alerts and reports.
Where the value shows up
| Business area | Impact for a reseller or solution provider |
|---|---|
| Technical debt | Warnings and issues are tracked over time, not forgotten |
| Upgrade readiness | Problem areas are known before a major update |
| Partner oversight | Objective evidence of the quality of delivered code |
| Prioritization | Effort goes to the extensions with the most issues |
| Alerting | Teams are told when a change makes quality worse |
The most valuable use is trend data. A single build's warnings tell you little. A six-month trend tells you whether your code base is under control.
A worked scenario
Consider a business telecoms reseller with 4,000 customers on recurring contracts (an illustrative example). It has four extensions maintained partly in-house and partly by a partner.
The IT manager sets up the build pipeline to keep the structured compiler logs from every workspace build and push the counts to a simple dashboard. Within two months, a pattern appears. The distributor integration extension's warnings are climbing steadily, mostly obsolete-API warnings that will turn into errors in a future release.
The IT manager raises it with the partner, who schedules a clean-up sprint well before the next major update. Without the trend data, the problem would only have surfaced when the upgrade failed.
Adoption considerations
- Keep the logs. Store build diagnostics centrally so you can compare over time.
- Pick a few key measures. Errors, warnings and obsolete-API usage per extension are a good start.
- Set alerts on regressions. Notify the team when a change increases warnings significantly.
- Share with partners. Use the data in regular reviews of partner-delivered code.
- Pair with automated tests. Diagnostics show code health, while tests show whether it works.
The bottom line
Resellers and solution providers can't afford fragile billing and integration code, because every failure hits recurring revenue. Structured compiler diagnostics in Business Central 29.0 turn code quality from a feeling into a measure. That makes it possible to manage technical debt deliberately, long before it becomes an outage or a failed upgrade.
If your business depends on several custom Business Central extensions, it's worth setting up quality tracking with an experienced adviser as part of your 29.0 planning.
Source: Microsoft roadmap 573351