Hello everyone,
I hope you all are doing well today. If you really want to learn and code for Business Central then you are in the right place. Let's talk a little bit about the past means about NAV.
In the past, Microsoft Dynamics NAV used to have its own integrated Development Environment, the C/Side Development Environment. This allowed developers to modify existing code.
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Fig 1: Microsoft Dynamics NAV Development Environment: Where developers can directly change the code
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Because it’s not a very good idea to change the source code directly and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-based solution, Microsoft changed the way developers can add and extend existing code by creating “Extensions”.
With the arrival of Extensions, Microsoft also chooses to use another Development Environment. In April 2015, Microsoft launched a free and open-source code editor “Visual Studio Code”. Try not to confuse Visual Studio Code with the code editor Visual Studio, which is used for creating, building and deploying large Microsoft .NET solutions.
Visual Studio Code can be installed on Windows, Linux, and macOS. You can download the Visual Studio Code at https://code.visualstudio.com.
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Fig 2: Visual Studio Code - Sample AL Page Extension: This extends Customer List Page
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With Visual Studio Code we can write “Application Language-code” (AL-code) to create extensions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. AL is the language we use to create and access objects, writing logic, etc.
Visual Studio Code also knows a concept called “Extensions”. When we talk about Extensions in Visual Studio Code, we talk about small packages that are created to extend the standard functionality. By default, Visual Studio Code knows a few basic programming and markup languages like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, NodeJS, etc.
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Fig 3: Extension in Dynamics 365 Business Central: When you deploy an extension you can find it here
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If you would like to use Visual Studio Code for other languages you can install extra packages, also called “Extensions”. Microsoft created an extension for AL(Application Language) so that by installing this extension we can use Visual Studio Code for developing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central solutions.
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Fig 4: Extensions Manager in Visual Studio Code: You can download other packages from here using search
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In the next articles, I am going to give a small introduction to Visual Studio Code and show you how you can install the AL extension to start developing solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Stay Tuned!
