The preview environments for Business Central 2026 release wave 2 are now rolling out globally. If you have access to the Business Central admin center, you can spin up a sandbox on version 29.0 today and start looking at what is coming.
Microsoft's
announcement and the full details are here: aka.ms/BCMajorUpdates
What this
actually is
Twice a
year, Business Central gets a major update. Wave 1 lands in April, wave 2 in
October. Ahead of each one, Microsoft opens up preview environments so partners
and customers can test their own apps, extensions, and integrations against the
new version before it becomes the version everyone is running.
That is what
just happened. Version 29.0 is the wave 2 release, and the preview build is
available now.
This is not
a "read the release notes and nod" moment. It is the window where you
can find the thing that breaks your customer's environment and get it fixed
before it becomes a production incident.
How to
get a preview environment
From the
Business Central admin center, go to Environments, choose New,
and create a Sandbox. In the Version dropdown, pick the 29.0
preview build.
A few things
worth knowing before you do:
- Create it as a Sandbox,
not Production. Preview builds are for testing and nothing else.
- Preview environments are
temporary. Do not build anything on one that you expect to keep.
- Localization matters. If you
support multiple countries, test the ones you actually deploy to.
What to
test
If you are a
partner or an ISV, the list is fairly short and fairly obvious:
Your AL
extensions.
Recompile against the 29.0 symbols. Deprecations and breaking changes in the
base application show up here first, and they show up as compile errors, which
is the cheapest possible place to find them.
Your
integrations. API
pages, OData endpoints, web services, anything talking to Business Central from
the outside. These break quietly, which makes them worse than the things that
break loudly.
Your
customer-specific customizations. The ones nobody has looked at in two years are the ones that
will surprise you.
The new
features you care about. Check the release plan on Microsoft Learn for what is in wave 2, then go
poke at the features that touch your customers' processes. Reading about a
feature and using it produce different opinions.
Reporting
what you find
If something
is broken, report it. This is the part that matters most and gets skipped most.
Bugs and
feedback go here: aka.ms/BCPreviewBugs
A good
report saves everyone time. Include the version number, the localization,
whether it reproduces on a clean environment, and the steps to get there. If
you can reproduce it without your own extensions installed, say so, because
that immediately tells the engineering team it is theirs and not yours.
Why this
is worth your time
The preview
window is short. Once the release goes GA and your environments start updating,
a problem you could have raised as a preview bug becomes a support ticket with
a customer waiting on the other end of it.
The people
who find the interesting problems during preview are the ones running real
extensions against real data. That is you. Microsoft cannot test every
combination of ISV app, custom code, and integration that exists in the field,
and it does not pretend to. That is exactly why the preview exists and why the
feedback loop is open.
So create a
sandbox, recompile your code, and go looking for trouble. Better to find it
now.
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