Welcome Dynamics 365 BC Lovers,
As I already told you in Getting Started post, 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, then click on the Download for Windows or simple Download button, and then after the downloading setup file install the Visual Studio Code.
Fig 1: Click on Download for Windows or simple Download Button [Download will be started]
Now as you downloaded the setup, start the installation process. The installation process is very simple just run the setup Click on Next, “Accept the agreement – Click on Next”, Next, Next, Next, Install, OK.
Figure 2: Installation Steps
As we installed Visual Studio Code successfully, now open the Visual Studio Code. We will get a welcome page with links to start creating new projects, opening recent projects, or use the help. On the left side, we can see some tabs. The first tab or the explorer tab will shows you the active folder with files you’re working on. The second tab or the search tab is help us to search or replace certain text values in all of your files. You can even include and exclude specific files via three dots. The third tab or the source control is very helpful when we want 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 tab 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. But with every fresh installation we always have 5 tabs by default from explorer to extension.
Figure 3: Visual Studio Code IDE
And also you can see a setting gear on below left corner, when you click on this you will see multiple options are available as shown below:
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.
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