Day: April 4, 2025

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 11th of the new functionality in the Development section is search, navigate and use app symbols as context for GitHub Copilot.

You can now search AL objects from downloaded symbol packages from within Visual Studio Code. This makes it much easier to find related objects, whether for inspection, troubleshooting, or as inspiration. It can even be used as context when using GitHub Copilot to get better suggestions based on existing code.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2025
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

You can now search objects from downloaded symbol packages via the ‘Open Symbol by Name’ functionality (Ctrl+T).

This makes it much easier to find objects, and open the source, if the symbols include source code.

It also empowers GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code. You can open the source for selected, related symbols to use as context for Copilot Studio when you write your own code, to get better suggestions.

The performance of searching workspace symbols has, furthermore, been improved to support the larger amount of available symbols.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 10th of the new functionality in the Development section is select extensions to open in Visual Studio Code from the web client.

Several releases ago, Microsoft introduced the powerful ability to open Visual Studio Code from within the web client, that is, a specific environment, to investigate or debug code. Microsoft now add the ability to proactively select the extensions to include in the project when opening Visual Studio Code. If the user has permissions to access source, that code will be available in the opened Visual Studio Code. Otherwise, it will be symbols that can be used for investigating functionality in AL Explorer or to code against.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2025
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

On the Extension Management page there’s now a Develop in VS Code action group with a number of new possibilities for developers. One of these is the Download in VS Code action that allows the user to select one or more extensions to open in Visual Studio Code.
In the opened Visual Studio Code project, there’s always access to symbols for those extensions, whereas access to source depends on IP protection settings for the involved extensions and user permissions.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 9th of the new functionality in the Development section is read and write YAML in AL using JsonObject.

When using data-driven testing, especially for testing Copilot features, there can be a need to read YAML test data. Rather than building an entirely new YAML object model, the existing JSON support is extended so that YAML can be read into the JsonObject, manipulated as JSON with the JsonObject API, and possibly written out again as YAML.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2025
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

The existing JsonObject is extended so that YAML can be read into the JsonObject, manipulated as JSON with the JsonObject API, and possibly written out again as YAML.

Two new methods are added to read YAML into a JsonObject instance:

[Ok :=] ReadFromYaml(String)
[Ok :=] ReadFromYaml(InStream)

Two new methods are added to write a JsonObject instance as YAML:

[Ok :=] WriteToYaml(String)
[Ok :=] WriteToYaml(OutStream)