One of the long awaited feature that you will see in Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (v23) is the ability to oen a Visual Studio Code debugging session from within the web client for a specific customer production or sandbox environment.
To simplify and speed up this process, a new option to open a local Visual Studio Code instance for the current extension and environment will be added to the web client, allowing just a single click to set up a matching VS Code project for investigation or troubleshooting.
The new feature supports two different contexts:
- You can use the new Attach debugger to this session action from the Help and Support page to troubleshoot the current session.
- You can use the new Explore page in Visual Studio Code action from within the Page Inspector.
The first possible option is to start a debugging session from the Help and Support page:
The action will ask you to open a Visual Studio Code session and a new AL project will be generated attached to the current session:
From here you can immediately download symbols, select the debugging type to perform and start working. No more configurations to manually perform on Visual Studio Code now.
NOTE: I’ve noted that in the public preview the link from Help and Support page on some localization is broken. It opens vscode//ms-dynamics-smb.al instead of vscode://ms-dynamics-smb.al. You need to fix it manually.
The second possibility to start debuggins is from the Page Inspection page:
A new AL project for debugging will be generated as previusly explained.
Please remember the following:
- If Visual Studio Code is already open, the last active session will be used; otherwise, a new Visual Studio Code will open. If the AL Language extension isn’t installed, the user will be asked to install it, and the process ends.
- The user will be asked if they want to investigate, or debug sandbox or production.
- A new project will be created, and a matching launch configuration will be created, depending on production or sandbox environment.
- If the user chooses to investigate, symbols for the invoked page will be added and the AL Explorer will open to easily allow browsing objects.
- If the user chooses to debug, Visual Studio Code will attach to the web client process, which it was invoked from and await breaking on error.
- In both cases, access to the source code will be gated by the resource exposure profile settings for each extension.
Stefano Demiliani 