A brief history of Business Central

Each new version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the result of inspiration and hard work, along with some good fortune and expert technical investment over the last 30 years.

The beginning

Three college friends, Jesper Balser, Torben Wind, and Peter Bang, from Denmark Technical University (DTU) founded their computer software business in 1984 when they were in their early twenties; that business was PC Computing & Consulting (PC & C), and its first product was called PC Plus.

Single-user PC Plus

PC Plus was released in 1985 with the primary goal of ease of use. An early employee said its functional design was inspired by the combination of a manual ledger journal, an Epson FX-80 printer, and a Canon calculator. Incidentally, Peter Bang is the grandson of one of the founders of Bang & Olufsen, the manufacturer of home entertainment systems par excellence.

PC Plus was a PC DOS-based, single-user system. PC Plus’s design included the following features:

• An interface resembling the use of documents and calculators
• Online help
• Good exception handling
• Minimal reliance on computer resources

The PC Plus product was marketed through dealers in Denmark and Norway.

Multi-user Navigator

In 1987, PC & C released a new product, the multi-user Navigator, and a new corporate name, Navision. Navigator was quite a technological leap forward. It included the following features:

• Client/server technology
• A relational database
• Transaction-based processing
• Version management
• High-speed OLAP capabilities (SIFT technology)
• A screen painter tool
• A programmable report writer

In 1990, Navision was expanding its marketing and dealer recruitment efforts into Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Also, in 1990, a third version of Navigator was released. Navigator V3 was still a character-based system, albeit a very sophisticated one. If you had the opportunity to study Navigator V3.x, you would instantly recognize the roots of today’s Business Central product. By V3, the product included the following features:

• A design based on object-oriented concepts
• Integrated 4GL Table, Form, and Report Design tools (the IDE)
• Structured exception handling
• Built-in resource management
• The original programming language that became C/AL, which later changed to AL
• Function libraries
• The concept of regional or country-based localization

When Navigator V3.5 was released, it also included support for multiple platforms and multiple databases. Navigator V3.5 would run on both Unix and Windows NT networks. It supported Oracle and Informix databases, as well as those developed in-house.

At about this time, several major strategic efforts were initiated. On the technical side, the decision was made to develop a GUI-based product. The first prototype of Navision Financials (for Windows) was shown in 1992. At about the same time, a relationship was established that would take Navision into distribution in the United States. The initial release in the US in 1995 was V3.5 of the character-based product, rechristened Avista for US distribution.

Navision Financials for Windows

In 1995, Navision Financials V1.0 for Microsoft Windows was released. This product had many (but not all) of the features of Navigator V3.5. It was designed for complete look-and-feel compatibility with Windows 95. There was an effort to provide the same ease of use and flexibility of development in Microsoft Access. The new Navision Financials was very compatible with Microsoft Office and was thus sold as “being familiar to any Office user.” Like any V1.0 product, it was quickly followed by a much-improved V1.1.

In the next few years, Navision continued to be improved and enhanced. Major new functionalities, such as the following, were added:

• Customer Relation Management (CRM)
• Manufacturing (ERP)
• Advanced distribution (including Warehouse Management)

Various Microsoft certifications were obtained, providing muscle to the marketing efforts. Geographic and dealer-based expansion continued apace. By 2000, according to the Navision Annual Report of that year, the product was represented by nearly 1,000 dealers (Navision Solution Centers) in 24 countries and used by 41,000 customers, located in 108 countries.

Growth and mergers

In 2000, Navision Software A/S and its primary Danish competitor, Damgaard A/S, merged. Product development and new releases continued for the primary products of both original firms (Navision and Axapta). In 2002, the now much larger Navision Software, with all of its products (Navision, Axapta, the smaller, older C5, and XAL) was purchased by Microsoft, becoming part of the Microsoft Business Systems division, along with the previously purchased Great Plains Software business and its several product lines. The Navision and Great Plains products all received a common rebranding to become the Dynamics product line. Navision was renamed Dynamics NAV and, later, Business Central.

As early as 2003, research began with the Dynamics NAV development team, planning moves to further enhance NAV and take advantage of various parts of the Microsoft product line. Goals were defined to increase integration with products such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook. Goals were also set to leverage the functional capabilities of Visual Studio Code and SQL Server, among others. Throughout this, there was a determination not to lose the strength and flexibility of the base product.

NAV 2009 was released in late 2008, NAV 2013 in late 2012, followed by NAV 2015 in late 2014. NAV 2017 was released in October 2016. The biggest hurdles to the new technologies have been cleared. A new user interface, the Role Tailored Client, was created as part of this renewal. NAV was tightly integrated with Microsoft’s SQL Server and other Microsoft products, such as Office, Outlook, and SharePoint. Development is more integrated with Visual Studio Code and is more .NET-compliant. The product became more open and, at the same time, more sophisticated, supporting features such as web services access, web and tablet clients, integration of third-party controls, and RDLC and Word-based reporting.

Continuous enhancement

Business Central was made available from Microsoft as a cloud-based application in April 2018. Development changed from inline code changes to extensions. Extensions are a method of adding functionality to existing objects to modify a solution’s behavior. Microsoft continues to invest in, enhance, and advance Business Central. More capabilities and functionality are added with every new release. Business Central continues to be one of the fastest-growing products within the Microsoft organization.

AL language roots

One of the first questions asked by people new to AL is often, “What other programming language is it like?” The best response is Pascal enhanced with C# features.

At the time, the three founders of Navision were attending classes at DTU, Pascal was widely used as a preferred language, not only on computer courses but also on other courses where computers were tools and software had to be written for data analyses. Some of the strengths of Pascal as a tool in an educational environment also made it an ideal model for Navision’s business application development.

Perhaps coincidentally (or perhaps not), at the same time at DTU, a Pascal compiler called Blue Label Pascal was developed by Anders Hejlsberg. That compiler became the basis for what was Borland’s Turbo Pascal, which was considered the everyman’s compiler of the 1980s because of its low price. Anders went with his Pascal compiler to Borland. While he was there, Turbo Pascal morphed into the Delphi language and IDE tool set under his guidance.

Michael Nielsen, formerly of Navision and Microsoft, who developed the original C/AL compiler, runtime, and IDE, said that the design criteria provide an environment that can be used without the following tasks:

• Dealing with memory and other resource-handling
• Thinking about exception handling and state
• Thinking about database transactions and rollbacks
• Knowing about set operations (SQL)
• Knowing about OLAP (SIFT)

Paraphrasing some of Michael’s additional comments, the goals of the language and IDE designs included the following:

• Allowing a developer to focus on design rather than coding but still allowing flexibility
• Providing a syntax based on Pascal stripped of complexities, especially relating to memory management
• Providing a limited set of predefined object types and reducing the complexity and learning curve

Implementing database versioning for a consistent and reliable view of the database

The basic principles of Michael’s design for Navision still exist within the AL language and Visual Studio Code IDE for modern Business Central development.