This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1.
The first of the new functionality in the Development section is AL Explorer And AL Home In Visual Studio Code AL Extension.
Over the last several releases Microsoft have made a remarkable transformation of their development tools, to align them with the expectations of the worldwide community of developers. Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and Application Insights are the tools used by millions of developers worldwide, and they can now join the Business Central developer community much easier, with less ramp-up time needed.
On the other hand, regardless of their efforts in scaling the developer community, the broader trend shows that we won’t be able to keep up with the demand in that area, so Microsoft need to focus their efforts on increasing pro developer productivity as well as re-enabling consultants to do more on their own, like in the classic C/SIDE RAD experience, with little to no dependency on scarce pro developer resources or need to work directly in source code, and still abiding to proper quality and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Feb 2023
General Availability: Apr 2023
Feature Details
With the introduction of the AL Explorer, we are bringing a powerful tool to the hands of pro developers and technical consultants, allowing both roles to explore, navigate, and better understand objects in extensions, including object details, dependencies, and extension points, without looking at the code. This increases daily productivity for developers and allows technical consultants to understand high-level structures of extensions in order to specify new features, or even do light troubleshooting.
It also introduces a foundation for future visual editors that can further improve productivity and lower ramp-up time for new developers. In addition, it empowers technical consultants to perform mock-ups and light modifications to Business Central without having to work directly in code, but still be part of integrated CI/CD processes including pro developer reviews, approvals, and automated test and deployment.
View, search, and filter objects
You can easily see an overview of all objects in a given app scope—for example, a whole workspace or selected project—and you can search in object names, and group objects by type.
Go to source code
For a selected object, you can quickly jump to source code, whether it’s to develop, read, and understand it, or whether it’s to add breakpoints as part of troubleshooting.
Bookmark
You can bookmark objects used frequently to easily filter a list of objects to only the bookmarked ones—for example, when navigating between those you currently work on.
View extension points – events, APIs, and enums
To ease creating extension points and to extend existing ones, AL Explorer also allows fast overview of all events and API pages as well as extensible enums that implement interfaces.
AL Home
Finally, the new AL Home startup page introduces a new communication channel, allowing Business Central R&D to efficiently share news, best practices, upcoming events, urgent information and status, learning content, and more to all users of the AL Visual Studio Code extension.
New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1
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