Mastering a Modern Development Environment

In the previous chapter, we introduced Dynamics 365 Business Central and the amazing momentum that its online version is enjoying.

In this chapter, we will take a close look at the development environment. We will discuss the main shortcuts, tips, and tricks related to Visual Studio Code, the official development platform, and the AL Language extension, the development language extension. The union between Visual Studio Code and AL defines the so-called modern development environment.

AL Language is the official Visual Studio Code extension provided by Microsoft, free of charge, through the online marketplace. AL stands for Application Language, although it’s typically referred to as AL Language. Officially released for the first time back in 2017 to extend what was then called Dynamics 365 for Financials (formerly Project Madeira), it is now a solid, fully fledged development language that extends Dynamics 365 Business Central. It comes equipped with a lot of features that greatly enhance developers’ productivity and coding quality.

The main goal of this chapter is to help Dynamics 365 Business Central developers understand what the development platform offers, unleash their potential, and become proficient in their daily coding activities.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

• What the Visual Studio Code user interface is composed of, and the purpose of each section
• How to be proficient in using the most powerful Visual Studio Code editing features
• What the AL Language extension is and what it consists of
• Turning on code analyzers to check and enforce encoding rules
• Enabling GitHub Copilot to accelerate the writing of code