Summary of Developer Preview - February 2019 for MSDYN365BC.

Hi Readers,

Microsoft has released updates for Developer Preview for February 2019. Below is the summary of changes in AL / VSCode.

Why Should We Worry about these updates?
With all these updates, we will understand what all is allowed as Event or is allowed in AL when you upgrade/develop in AL. All these changes are introduced in Product based on Microsoft strategy for the product and also based on customer/partners suggestions about enhancements in the product.

10 Changes Released with Developer Preview February 2019 in #MSDYN365BC.

• The biggest announcement this month is that Microsoft is publishing a preview of the base application fully on AL language. There is a new Docker image, which contains this version here: bcinsider.azurecr.io/bcsandbox-master:14.0.28630.0-al. 

• Rapid Application Development (RAD) - RAD is a C/SIDE term used for changing an application object, compiling it, and seeing the results instantaneously in the client. Microsoft have tried to replicate a similar experience for extension development in AL Language in VS Code. More specifically it is about publishing only the objects that changed since the last full publish took place. This is especially useful when working on large projects with several thousands of objects.

• Ctrl+Alt+F5 for incremental publish
• Alt+F5 for incremental publish and invoking debugging

• New schema update mode - ForceSync - Recreate and Synchronize were options avilable till now as Schema Update Mode.

• Debug without publishing - A new command has been added - Ctrl+Shift+F5 - which will start the debugger attached to the Visual Studio Code launched client session. Please be aware that if you start debugging without publishing you will be debugging the last published code of your app.  

• New Browser Support for Debugging - Firefox has also been added to the list of supported browsers that will open a client for a VsCode debugging session.

• Debugger info for http, json etc - Variable value inspection has been added for:
• HttpClient, HttpRequestMessage, HttpResponseMessage, HttpHeaders
• JsonValue, JsonToken, JsonObject, JsonArray
• XmlElement, XmlDocument, XmlNode, XmlText, XmlComment, XmlCData, XmlAttribute

• Code actions - Code Actions is a VS Code feature providing the user with possible corrective actions right next to an error or warning. If actions are available, a light bulb appears next to the error or warning. 

• TableRelation extensibility - The TableRelation property on table fields can now be modifed in a table extension. 

• Views - Views offer a way to improve user productivity when working with list pages by proposing an alternative view of the page.
• Defining views in AL 
• Filtering and sorting
• Ordering
• Modifying the page layout
• Modifying views from extensions/customizations
• Visualizing Views in the Web client 

• AllObj and AllObjWithCaption no longer contains obsolete Tables - The 'AllObj' and 'AllObjWithCaption' virtual tables no longer contains obsolete tables.

For Detailed Updates Refer to the Microsoft Article.

Hope you find the information useful. This information is useful when you code in the future.

Regards,
Saurav Dhyani
www.sauravdhyani.com