Hey Everyone,
As I told you, you have to install the Visual Studio Code before going to start developing solutions for Business Central using Application Language(AL).
Welcome to Introduction of the Visual Studio Code, To be able to create a new application for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, we must install the Visual Studio Code. First, we go to code.VisualStudio.com, we click the download for the Windows button, and then we can install the latest version of the Visual Studio Code.
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Fig 1: https://code.visualstudio.com/ -> Click on Download for Windows Button [Download will be started]
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After downloading the setup start the installation process:
Now we can start the installation by running the setup. We click next, accept the agreement, next, next, next.
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Fig 2: Setup Welcome Screen -> Click Next
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Fig 3: Agreement Screen -> Accept the agreement and Click Next
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Fig 4: Destination Screen -> Choose installation location and Click on Next
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Fig 5: Choose location for your application .exe -> By default Program's shortcuts -> Click Next
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In this screen, we are going to check the add open with code action to the Windows Explorer file context and directory context. With this, we can open the Visual Studio Code directly via Windows Explorer.
Fig 6: Choose Additional Task for Application and Click Next
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Now click Next to Install the Visual Studio Code on your Computer.
Fig 7: Setup Ready Screen -> Click Install to install the Application
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Fig 8: Installing Screen -> After installing click ok and close the Screen Open Visual Studio Application
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When we open the Visual Studio Code, we get a welcome page with links to start creating new projects, opening recent projects, or use the help. On the left side, we find some tabs. The first tab shows you the active folder with files you're working on. The second tab is to search and maybe replace certain text values in one of your files. You can even include and exclude specific files via three dots. The third tab is to use the source control system. Out of the box, Git is built-in, but you can also install an extension for Visual Studio Team Foundation. Then there's a debug tab where you can step through your code, and finally, the last step is to install and remove Visual Studio Code extensions. You can see other tabs for Powershell Command Explorer, Github Pull Request and SQL Server you can also install other packages to do different tasks using the Visual Studio Code.
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Fig 9: Visual Studio Code - Welcome Screen
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Finally, on left below corner, you can see the setting gear in which multiple options are available as shown below:
Fig 10: Setting Gear Option
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Visual Studio Code is a basic development environment, but it can be extended to be a lot more functionality and options via extensions. You can also create, for example, HTML websites and CSS files. CSS files are used to configure which colors and font size your websites will use. If you want Visual Studio to help you with the syntax of CSS, you can find extensions for that. Visual Studio Code has no support for creating application language code out of the box, but you can install an extension for that.
I hope now you understand, what is Visual Studio Code and how much you can do with it, this is just a start but you always have to think before you are going to do any kind of development, choosing environment is very important before you are going to write a single line of code.
In the next articles, I am going to show you how you can install the AL extension to start developing solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Stay Tuned!
