Getting Access to The Top Secret Business Central Insider Program

by Steve Endow

If you are a Dynamics 365 Business Central developer or ISV, you should definitely get access to the Business Central Insider program.

Business Central Insider Program

I don't know why the BC Insider program is so cumbersome to join, but I'm guessing it involves lots of lawyers. Which is unfortunate, since I think BC Insider is an essential program for any BC developer.

I thought I had a link to the BC Insider program on my BC Resources page, but apparently not, as it seems to require several steps, and is not available through a single URL, unfortunately.

I did a few DuckDuckGo searches, but came up with nothing.  I then did several Google searches, but still couldn't find any Microsoft pages explaining how to join the BC Insider program.

After several searches, I finally found Daniel Rimmelzwaan's excellent blog post from February 9, 2022:

http://thedenster.com/insider-builds-on-collaborate

Thankfully, he documented the process for signing up for Business Central Insider after going through the same puzzling search for one of his clients.  

Business Central Web API Error When Using $expand

 By Steve Endow

I recently responded to a Business Central Community Forum post here:

https://community.dynamics.com/business/f/dynamics-365-business-central-forum/448915/api-query-with-odata-date-filter-with-encoding

While researching that question, I learned something from that forum post:  $expand=*

Huh, I didn't know that was possible!

If you aren't familiar with the $expand OData query option, check out my blog post on the topic:

https://blog.steveendow.com/2021/09/using-metadata-and-expand-with-business.html

So it seems that you can use a wildcard with $expand to automatically expand all Navigation Properties available in a Business Central Web API endpoint. Very interesting!

I personally don't think I would ever recommend using such a query option in a real world API integration, but I was intrigued by the possibility!

So I fired up Postman and did some testing with my new found query option.

Query Option $expand=*