As a Business Central Developer, we know that the quickest and easiest way to check if a field has a value is to call the TestField method on a Record. When used, the system checks to see if the field is not zero or a blank string. If there is not a value, we are used to getting an error.
TestFields have gotten some love at the platform level to help users quickly solve data problems and continue in their processes. This blog post will walk you through the changes in system behavior, and how to tweak your code to maximize user efficiency.
Have you hit the midweek slump, and realized you have been putting off debugging that one weird issue all week? If you are on Business Central version 28 (or later), you can now let Copilot do some of the heavy lifting for you.
Have you experienced the newest bottleneck in your development process: Not being able to type your prompt fast enough.
There is an extension within VS Code – “VS Code Speech” that allows you to talk to the Chat.
Setup
Once installed, you need to enable “Hey Code” to keep your fingers off the keyboard.
Open VS Code Settings (Ctrl + ,) and search for “voice keyword”.
You will want to set your Keyword activation, and there are couple different options.
off: default value, your microphone will not be activated
chatInView: listens for ‘Hey Code’ when you are in the Chat view
quickChat: This is a lightweight, global chat UI window that you can open with Ctrl + Shift + P > Open Quick Chat
inlineChat: This opens chat directly in your editor at your cursor / selection with Ctrl + I
chatInContext: listens for ‘Hey Code’ wherever you are in VS Code.
Note: the description states that VS Code will record from your microphone, but the audio is processed locally and is never sent to a sever.
Once you say ‘Hey Code’ you can start talking, and GitHub Copilot Chat is listening.
Extension Features
End Dictation
To end dictation you have a couple of options.
Click the microphone button
Press Escape
Press Enter – which will also submit your chat request
You can also edit the text being generated as the microphone is listening, in case it didn’t understand you correctly.
Read Aloud
With “VS Code to Speech” enabled, you can also have the chat responses read to you. Once GitHub Copilot is done responding, you can click the speaker icon, and it will read what it responded with.
Dictate to Editor
You can also dictate directly in the editor. Think writing your markdown instructions.
Ctrl + Alt + V will open your microphone within your editor, and you are ready to talk!
Thank you to Michael Megel for sharing this with the community on this blog post.
Organizations rely on Business Central for operational and financial reporting, but many teams still export data to Excel when they need flexible analysis, custom layouts, or presentation‑ready visuals. Traditionally, this meant a significant amount of manual work: formatting, building pivot tables, adding calculated fields, and assembling dashboards.
What’s changed recently isn’t just one new feature, it’s the combination of Copilot capabilities across M365, and how they now naturally show up inside of Excel. When you put Excel Copilot, Agent Mode, and in‑place editing together, Excel stops being a passive spreadsheet tool and starts acting like an active reporting assistant.
Have you ever seen a custom Sales Line field’s data just disappear? You sit there wondering why is that getting cleared out.
There is a procedure on the Sales Header RecreateSalesLines() that deletes and rebuilds all lines for the document after key header changes. It copies existing lines into temporary tables, validates header-driven changes, and then re-inserts lines via CreateSalesLine().
Prompts are markdown files that are used by GitHub Copilot to assist in common development tasks. Instead of having to type out the same instructions, you can pull prompts into your chat to reuse the logic and speed up your development workflow.
Let’s talk about how we can create our own custom reusable prompts for GitHub Copilot!
BC Development Notebook 