The Academy bootcamp at Community Summit North America 2026 gave me a working foundation in AL development and the confidence to start building Business Central extensions on my own.
Before the main conference opened at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, I spent October 9–11 in a three-day Academy class on Business Central AL development. Here’s what the bootcamp covered, what I took away, and why I’d recommend it. (I cover the main conference, General Sessions, expo and networking in a separate post.)
The Academy: three days of AL with two MVPs
The best decision I made was registering for the Academy pre-conference. I took the three-day D365 Business Central AL Development Bootcamp: 2 Days to Build Your Foundation & 1 Day on Advanced Extensibility Techniques, led by Brad Prendergast and AJ Ansari.
If you work in the Business Central world, you probably know both names. Brad is VP of Software Development at Tigunia and a Microsoft MVP who has worked with the product since its Navision days in the late 1990s. AJ is COO at DSWi and also a Microsoft MVP. The two have co-taught this AL bootcamp at Summit for several years, and it shows: they finish each other’s explanations and know exactly where newcomers get stuck.
The format worked well:
- Days 1–2, the foundation. Setting up a development environment, understanding Business Central’s architecture, and building and publishing extensions. We created new tables and pages and extended existing ones.
- Day 3, advanced extensibility. Going beyond the basics into the techniques you need for real-world, upgrade-safe customizations.
What set it apart from a typical session was the hands-on time. We weren’t watching demos; we were writing AL, hitting errors, and fixing them with two experts in the room.
What I took home from the bootcamp
- Extend, don’t modify. Everything in modern Business Central development is an extension. Learning to think in table extensions, page extensions and events changed how I approach customization requests.
- Architecture first, code second. Understanding how tables, pages, codeunits and the base application fit together made the AL syntax click much faster.
- A clean dev environment saves hours. Getting VS Code, the AL Language extension, sandboxes and
launch.jsonright on day one paid off every day after. - Design for upgrades. The advanced day drove home that good extensibility is about surviving the next release wave, not just making something work today.
- Learn from people who’ve done it for decades. Brad’s and AJ’s real implementation stories were as valuable as the exercises.
Learning alongside peers
Academy classes are small, and that made a big difference. By day three my classmates felt like colleagues. We compared how our organizations use Business Central, swapped ideas for extensions we want to build, and kept the conversation going all week at Summit.
Having Brad and AJ available for questions over three full days was invaluable. Questions that would take weeks to untangle alone got answered in minutes. We played Business Central Trivia (Business Central Trivia) with the entire class and the selected 3 contestant.
The power summary
The AL Development Bootcamp was the highlight of my Summit week. In three days, Brad Prendergast and AJ Ansari took me from AL fundamentals to advanced extensibility, and I left ready to build real Business Central extensions.
My advice if you’re considering an Academy class:
- Register early. Academy classes are capacity-limited and sell out.
- Bring a laptop ready to code. Install VS Code and the AL Language extension in advance so you can start building on day one.
- Bring real problems. Customization requests from your own organization make the exercises far more useful.
- Stay for the conference. The Academy and the main Summit complement each other, and CPE credits are a bonus.
Summit 2027 heads to Columbus, Ohio, October 17–21, 2027, and I’m already looking at which Academy class to take next.
Thank you, Brad and AJ, for three outstanding days, and to my classmates for making it fun.
