Tag: Basics

#HumpDayHacks a cat sitting at a desk in front of a camel standing on a football field

#HumpDayHacks – Avoiding Validation Chaos

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

Have you used the AZ AL Dev Tools New AL File Wizard to create objects? It’s probably as fast as my cats running into the kitchen when they hear the pantry door open.  Quick, efficient, and surprisingly satisfying.

But speed isn’t everything, especially when it comes to creating pages in AL for Business Central. If you’re not careful, that lightening-fast setup can lead to subtle issues that only show up later when your page doesn’t behave quite the way you expect. One of the most overlooked culprits? Field Order.

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Live Share - VS Code Pair Programming

Live Share – VSCode Pair Programming

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

As a developer, we oftentimes participate in code reviews where we are either sharing our screen, or viewing someone else’s code. How hard is it to identify where some code needs to be changed, or it’s hard to follow someone navigating through their code.

Perhaps you are rubber duck debugging, and your code still isn’t making sense. That whole “it works in my Docker container, but not in the Sandbox”, and wouldn’t it be nice to debug WITH a co-worker? You can both set break points within the same code base, and debug within someone’s local Docker container.

Maybe you want to speed up development. One person is adding fields and pages, and someone else is adding some custom business logic, but it relies on those fields being created. We know that you need to add the related fields to the “sister tables” to the data flows through to all the related posted tables, but man, does that take some extra effort. You can share one person’s VS Code instance, and pair program!

If any of the above scenarios sound interesting to you, then you need to install the Live Share VS Code extension!

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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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