Directions EMEA 2026: Preparing for Modern Development with Dynamics 365 Business Central

Directions EMEA 2026 begins on October 27. As attendees from the region and beyond prepare to gather in Paris, MSDW spoke with Finn Pedersen, an independent developer and consultant who will be presenting at the partner-focused event about the growing importance of modern development as Dynamics 365 Business Central evolves to use more AI-based tools and services.

Long before his current projects, Pedersen got his start as a software engineering student at the Technical University of Denmark. He quickly became passionate about the concept of formal specifications for software to prove mathematically what programs are doing. In 1994, he joined Navision, the original makers of the business software that has evolved into Business Central, and then Microsoft, where he worked on CRONUS localizations to 16 different national markets. In 1996, Pedersen was added to Navision France because he also spoke French. 

This year’s session, “Modern Business Central Development Is Everyone’s Business” marks a departure from Pedersen’s recent topics like automated testing, vibe coding, and 100 percent code coverage. 

“This one here is born out of pure frustration,” he explained. In recent tests with two different customers to evaluate modern software development readiness, he flagged 32,000 and 39,000 warnings in the companies’ respective codebases. Developers at the two companies thought their codebase was in good shape, yet they had no requirements for automation, robustness, and quality. He continued:

Customers are frustrated but have no idea what to ask for. At the partner, there is no decision about writing automated tests or telling customers what’s going on. The article I wrote is rooted in this frustration. Nobody is explaining how to sell this. Customers are fed up with doing manual tests.

Despite common frustrations with testing and poor software quality in Business Central implementations, Pedersen said that customers and partners alike are often ignorant about modern software development techniques that involve AI. He sees cloud-based ERP as one of the driving factors creating urgency. 

Old fashioned, amateur code could work fine in a stable environment where you’re not upgrading. That’s not a problem, but suddenly code in the cloud became a real problem because you have to look at the code all the time. It’s changed by this dynamic environment we’re in right now. I became an advocate for clean code and wrote a whole article about the whole clean code initiative. I’ve been advocating for that and especially for adoption of all the new things in Business Central like automated tests and namespaces and extensibility through interfaces, and how it comes in through tests. How to write products that can be extended. All of that is part of modern software development.

Increasingly, modern software development has become a necessity, according to Pedersen. Many software developers already use AI-based products to write tests. Soaring usage of AI and Markdown files is driving increased demand for professional software developers, he believes, even as the software market goes through disruption. 

According to Pedersen, people attending Directions EMEA are ahead of the curve because the event’s sessions have explored tests and AI for the last three years, raising complex issues for members of the community to contemplate and act on. 

From past conferences in Poland and Denmark and Belgium, of course, [Directions has covered] everything about AI in the application. How can you use AI in connection with the application? Can you consider an agent almost like a colleague?...[So far] what the AI is really good at is looking at emails or support questions and dealing with them, or for agents in sales and expense management. Now, the effort is on building AI into the application itself. The level we’re at [in the industry] is super low. Microsoft is doing everything to catch up on that side.

There is now enormous energy in the community around AI for development, Pedersen believes, including for analyzing telemetry and running tests. Some development organizations have developers who rarely code manually, instead spending the day reviewing and planning based on what AI created overnight.

In his recent work, Pedersen has taken inspiration from the Ruby on Rails community. He describes it as an “opinionated” programming language geared toward programmer happiness. The Ruby on Rails community is one area that has moved toward AI built into the development process. 

Business Central is also opinionated, he believes. Ruby on Rails had a slump in usage for several years but suddenly surged in popularity thanks to AI programs that can learn from examples and train on open-source projects. For now, Business Central lags behind in AI-driven development, but through comparison with Ruby on Rails, Pedersen thinks that is poised to change. 

For anyone still on the fence about going to Directions EMEA 2026, Pedersen recommends going. He explained:

Everyone should go to the event. The management; the developers. This is so important. Some people are really talking about how partners that do not adopt this will be gone in three years. You’re going to die with the Navision people because you’re not competitive…I always have a dinosaur in my presentation because they’ll go extinct. I spoke with someone who didn’t know what Markdown is and has never written a test…This is completely taking off, like a rocket [so the time is now to adopt modern development.