This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.
The first of the new functionality in the Development section is open Visual Studio Code from web client to investigate or troubleshoot extensions.
Recreating a locally installed Visual Studio Code workspace to investigate or troubleshoot a customer environment includes creating workspaces, projects, and launch configurations, and downloading symbols, all of which require knowledge as well as time to go through it.
To simplify and speed up this process, a new option to open a local Visual Studio Code instance for a given extension and environment will be added to the web client.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023
Feature Details
As a developer or consultant, you can open a new Visual Studio Code session from within the web client for a specific customer production or sandbox environment. Different contexts will be supported—for example, for a page, page field, or extension from within the Page Inspector or from the Help and Support page. Depending on the context, Visual Studio Code will either open to allow inspecting objects and source, or to attach and debug the current web client session.
In this scenario, the following will happen:
- A new Visual Studio Code session begins.
- Projects for the chosen extensions will be created.
- Matching launch configuration will be created (depending on production or sandbox, but deployment is only possible on a sandbox).
- If invoked from a context to view extensions, symbols will be downloaded and the AL Explorer will open to easily allow browsing objects.
- If invoked to view source or attach and debug, the user will end in a debug AL (.dal) source file.
- In both cases, access to source will be gated by the resource exposure profile settings for each extension.
My Opinion
Happy for a developer to tell me otherwise, but this sounds like it could be a useful enhancement.
New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2
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