As far as I remember, social media around Business Central/NAV(ision) has never been as quiet as in the last months.
There is nothing from the MVP’s anymore and it seems the majority of partners are in the dark about that’s going on at Microsoft.
While this is true, Microsoft is updating the GitHub with the new AL foundation periodically with new code but without explaining the strategy. (https://github.com/microsoft/ALAppExtensions)
In fall, Microsoft will release the first Business Central without C/Side and refactored AL and because of that the shipping of daily insider builds has been blocked for a few months.
In the “old days” Microsoft would have code freeze before summer vacation and partners would get a build (DVD) which was very close to what Microsoft would ship at Directions.
Now there is nothing, except the GitHub without any guidelines on how to use it.
I’ve seen speculation that foundation will be dozens of small extensions, but I think this is a false rumour. My expectation is that each BC install will have three extensions.
Foundation
This is what you see on GitHub today. Most of which is stuff that should probably be part of the AL programming language such as TempBlob and Excel Buffer. Things NUGET offers for DotNET.
Application
This is what we have today as General Ledger, Inventory, Sales & Purchase, Jobs, Manufacturing etc.
This will be based on Foundation, but not broken up into smaller extensions even though that would be my preferred choice. Microsoft should have started that years ago and now they simply lack the time and skills. They fired most of the functional folks years ago in favor of a large platform and UI team.
This will lead to much rewrite of code, but not as much as most think.
After this I hope and expect that the design of the Application will be frozen since Microsoft cannot expect their partners to continuously refactor their code. We simply don’t have the resources to do that. Most partners don’t even have automated testing in place and refactoring is too expensive.
Large partners can write their own Application on top of Foundation allowing them to be on AppSource without Microsoft having to add half a million events for each business case.
Localizations
This is probably the coolest part if Microsoft can pull it off. Each localization will be an extension on top of Foundation and Application
Speculation & Opinion
I’m writing this in order to start a discussion and get some feedback what others expect. The information in this blog post is in no way confirmed by Microsoft.
Marije Brummel Blog | Business Central, Azure and more... 
I don’t see how localizations will work without performance problems unless they either change how table extensions work with keys or move everything to related tables – which will be cumbersome unless they change pages to work with multiple tables (easily) on the same page.
They had a couple of sessions at Directions NA about performance and the Microsoft recommendation was to move to related tables.
If they break the base into even more extensions, then shared tables will have lots of extensions or related tables.
What are your views about table extensions?
LikeLike
In my opinion one business case would be dealing with associatons on sales and purchases.
This means f.e.your customers are part of an association, which handles payments for it’s partners. (Association is not the Bill-to, because we want to see the sales on the real customers)
On the purchase we are part of an association, and some of our vendors are payed by the association, and we have to pay the vendors invoices to the association.
So this requires a new field “Association No.” in the ledger entries. If you want an overview which item is sold how often to an association, you need a key on “Item No.” and “Association No.” on “Item Ledger Entry” and /or “Value Entry” especialy if your “Value Entry”- table has a size of 45 GB in NAV 5.0.
LikeLike
A valid business case might be something like association handling.
This means that payments are handled by a central institution for a group of customers or vendors. The sales or purchases are handled by the customers or vendors because we want to see the business volume on them, not on a Bill-to or Pay-To. This requires that the association is stored with every document and also with “Cust. Ledger”, “Vendor Ledger”,”Item Ledger” and “Value Entry” because association member ship may change or orders are not handled via association.
So if you want to know the quantity or amounts you have bought or sold of a specific item to or from association members, you need a key on “Item No.” and “Association No.” if this should be performant, espcialy if your “Value Entry”- Table has a size of 45 GB.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In my opinion both addons an customisations are needed.
Addons add functionality, like online business, payment services, logistics,…
Customisations in my opinion are modifcations which allow faster/easier access to functions or combine functionalities under one action.
Depending on business case you may need addons to implement functions that are not available in the standard. If you have to check an information serveral times a day, or you have to do execute a group of actions 100 times a day, you may require easy access and probaly automatisms that allow you to spent your time with your business, not with oprating your ERP.
And here is the real difference. Small installations with less transcations need only addons for their business. Larger installations with many identical transactions need both addons and customisations to save time.(f.e. answering 5 times a day “yes” to the question on leaving an unposted order is not so diffcult. If you have to do this 100 times a day, you probably would hang the developer, who did this, on the next tree 😉 )
LikeLiked by 1 person