Transition from C/AL to AL - From a developer's point of view

Business Central Online, the latest offering in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 family has completely changed the way of ‘Customisation development’ for any experienced NAV developer. Coding language has changed from C/AL to AL (i.e. AL-Extension V2.0) with the custom code sitting as a separate extension, not at all interfering with the standard code. The custom code now gets deployed as an ‘app’ on top of the standard code base. Development interface has also undergone a change - earlier development was in C/SIDE, now it is through Visual Studio platform. For further details, refer my previous blog. Business Central offers a container-based image environment called ‘Docker’ enabling access to both the AL development environment and the C/SIDE development environment. Docker gets installed on a Windows OS machine – creating the Sandbox environment for a developer to work with. Sandbox is a non-production instance of Business Central available for development and testing.