Author: Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP

Your first AL Project

Get Started Developing for BC: Your first AL Project

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP1 Comment

So you want to develop custom code for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? The code for BC is written in AL, which stands for “Application Language”, and is a specific language only used for Business Central. To start writing AL code, you need to make sure you have Visual Studio Code installed, along with the AL Language extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. If you need more information on setting up your development environment, check out this blog post. At this point, we are ready to create our first AL project!

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Connecting to a Docker Container

Get Started Developing for BC: How to connect to a Docker container

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP1 Comment

You have an AL project that you want to work on within your new container. How exactly do you connect your code to your container BC instance? It’s pretty easy!


Within your AL Project you should have a .vscode folder, with a file called launch.json This is a configuration file that is used to define settings for launching and debugging applications. The following configurations should be set to work with a Business Central Container:

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#HumpDayHacks with Tonya Bricco-Meske

#HumpDayHacks – Attach Debugger to this Session

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

Have you ever been walking through a process in Business Central, and realize you want to debug, but don’t want to wait to publish, and get back to the exact spot where you were testing something? Or for some reason you were debugging something, and the debugger stopped, and you want to jump right back in to the process you were examining. This is where “Attach Debugger to this session” comes in handy,

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#HumpDayHacks – Search

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

Guess what day it is?! 🐫 Time for some more #HumpDayHacks, brought to you in part by Copilot.

If you are working in Business Central version 24, you may have accidently clicked the Copilot button instead of the Search 🔎 If you are really set on using the Search button, you can use the shortcut ALT + Q (and skip inadvertently opening Copilot). You can actually use the hotkey of ALT throughout Business Central to quickly navigate with your keyboard.

Copilot inside Business Central doesn’t have a hotkey (yet…) but it is available in US BC24 environments with at no additional cost. You can check if it’s enabled in your environment by searching for Copilot & AI capabilities.

#HumpDayHacks – Page Inspection Tool

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

I decided it’s time to start sharing some #HumpDayHacks 🐫 to help get you through working with Business Central.

First up, some Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central hacks when working with the Page Inspection tool. You can open it with Ctrl + Alt + F1, or by clicking ❓ Help > Help & Support (at the bottom) >Under Troubleshooting click Inspect Pages and data.

The Page Inspection tool is a cornucopia of information. What objects are you interacting with (be it a page, report, query, XMLPort, etc). You can see the underlying table, and even click “View Table” 🔍 to see the data in the table. More information right at your fingertips are the extensions you are interacting with, the underlying fields and datatypes

Now pay attention: 🤓 If you click on a field, if the field is on the page, it will locate it for you, and take you to it. Much faster than opening VSCode and trying to determine where a field is located on a page.


The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP6 Comments

Excel Reports are extremely useful when you need a detailed dataset. They not only provide a denormalized dataset, but also facilitate the creation of meaningful data connections, pivot charts, visualizations and more. A notable drawback has been the cumbersome process of generating an Excel Report from Business Central. This involves running a report request page, downloading the file, then opening and enabling the workbook before you can access any data. Moreover, once the report is generated, you are left with a static dataset that lacks a refresh option. This means the data remains unchanged from the moment the report was run.

In Business Central 23.3 we were given the ability to create refreshable datasets by calling Business Central APIs from within Excel. Here is a deep dive into how you can create a refreshable Excel Report Layout — all you need is a Business Central API and a Report.

[NOTE]: This blog post was written before the release of BC25 (2024 release wave 2). Extensive improvements have been made to make connecting to APIs through Excel Report Layouts easier. So if you are working with BC25, please check out this blog post

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