Book Image

Programming Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Sixth Edition

By : Marije Brummel, David Studebaker, Christopher D. Studebaker
Book Image

Programming Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Sixth Edition

By: Marije Brummel, David Studebaker, Christopher D. Studebaker

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a full ERP business solution suite with a robust set of development tools to support customization and enhancement. These tools can be used to tailor Business Central's in-built applications to support complete management functions for finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and operations. Using a case study approach, this book will introduce you to Dynamics 365 Business Central and Visual Studio Code development tools to help you become a productive Business Central developer. You'll also learn how to evaluate a product's development capabilities and manage Business Central-based development and implementation. You'll explore application structure, the construction of and uses for each object type, and how it all fits together to build apps that meet special business requirements. By the end of this book, you'll understand how to design and develop high-quality software using the Visual Studio Code development environment, the AL language paired with the improved editor, patterns, and features.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
9
Successful Conclusions

AL programming language

The language in which Business Central is coded is AL. A small sample of AL code within the AL Editor is shown here:

AL syntax is similar to Pascal syntax. Code readability is always enhanced by careful programmer attention to structure and logical variable naming, and ensuring that the process flow is consistent with that of the code in the base product and that there is good documentation both inside and outside of the code.

Good software development focuses on design before coding and accomplishing design goals with a minimal amount of code. Dynamics Business Central facilitates that approach. In 2012, a team made up of Microsoft and Business Central community members began the Business Central design patterns project. As defined by Wikipedia, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem. The following links provide information on the Business Central design patterns project: One of the primary goals of this project is to document patterns that exist within Business Central. In addition, new best practice patterns have been suggested as ways to solve common issues we encounter during our customization efforts. Now, when we work on Business Central enhancements, we will be aided by references to the documentation of patterns within Business Central. This allows us to spend more of our time designing a good solution using existing, proven procedures (the documented patterns) and spend less time writing and debugging code. A good reference for Business Central design and development using patterns can be found here: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/microsoft-dynamics-nav-2013-application-design.

You can refer to the Reusing Code section of Business Central at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dynamicsnav-2009/dd355277(v=nav.60).

Much of our Business Central development work is done by assembling references to previously defined objects and procedures, adding new data structures where necessary. As the tools for Business Central design and development that are provided both by Microsoft and by the Business Central community continue to mature, our development work becomes more oriented toward design and less toward coding. The end result is that we are more productive and cost-effective on behalf of our customers. Everyone wins.