BC 2023 rw 1: AL Explorer in Visual Studio Code

Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 1

Over the last few release waves, Microsoft has focused heavily on transforming and improving their development tools to meet the expectations of Business Central developers. With the many new developer enhancements introduced with Business Central 2023 release wave 1, developers worldwide can now work even faster and more efficiently.

Introduction of AL Explorer

With the introduction of AL Explorer for Visual Studio Code, Microsoft provides a powerful tool for Business Central developers and technical consultants that allows them to explore, navigate and better understand objects in extensions, including object details, dependencies and extension points, without having to look at the code. AL Explorer for Visual Studio Code increases the daily productivity of Business Central developers and enables consultants to understand structures in extensions at a high level and thus also to specify new functions or to easily debug.

View, search and filter objects

With AL Explorer for Visual Studio Code, you can easily get an overview of all objects in a given app scope - for example, it can be for an entire workspace or a selected project - and you have the option to search in object names and group the objects by type.

Get a view of all objects in the selected app scope

Go directly to the source code

For a selected object, AL Explorer for Visual Studio Code lets you quickly go to the source code, whether it's to develop, read and understand the code, or whether it's because you want to add breakpoints as part of debugging.

Naviger nemt til kilden for et givet objekt i AL Explorer

Bookmark objects

With AL Explorer for Visual Studio Code, you can bookmark the objects you use most, and thus easily filter a list of objects to only the bookmarked ones - for example when you have to navigate between the objects you are currently working on.

Bookmarked objects in the selected app scope

View extension points - Events, APIs and Enums

In order to make it easier to create extension points as well as to extend existing points, in AL Explorer you can also get a quick overview of all events and API pages as well as extensible enums that implement interfaces.

Overview of events in the selected app scope

Overview of all API pages in the selected app scope