Visual Code AL without Full Dev license.

Last day I was talking with Laura Nicolàs from leaning portal https://clipdynamics.com/. And both had the same question: it´s possible to develop with VSCode AL with customer non dev license? Can customers write code with VSCode?

Designing with customer regular license.

I was thinking about difficulties to teach NAV design to final customers without full developing license. Most of customer licenses only can develop code in reports and XML ports. They can´t put code into Codeunits, table and pages.

So essentially teaching final customers is create new tables, fields, pages and mainly report builder design. It´s easier to teach customer with full dev license, closer to your daily work and you are not fighting all the sessions with license limits and the absolute not funny fact: you can´t develop business logic.

The test with Visual Studio Code.

We configure in Nav 2018 local machine service with the specifications:

-          No dev full license.

-          Codeunit Objects purchased from 50000 to 50099.

A very common scenario in NAV customer final license.

So, the first test is develop an extension and deploy it pressing F5. The result is:

It failed because an object was out of 50000..50099 range (50150). If I change the number of the extension into available number range, the extension is successfully created.

I also notice, anyway with or without right range, the package can be created.

Conclusion: Customers can develop extensions with their own license, also Codeunits. The only requirement is assign numbers in their purchased range objects (even for tableextensions and pageextensions).

Able doesn´t mean easy. Opinion.

We can expect a crowd of final customers developing Codeunits by themselves……….or may be not.

We can see some difficulties for become this real: C/SIDE was simple and direct, more accessible to people without a strong programming knowledge. VIsual Studio Code is less democratic on that point. It´s free, but requires programming background.

Also we are all the time in an On-premise scenario and On-premise will not be future mainly scenario.