Developing extensions for ISV solutions. Applications family.

Hello colleagues.

It's great when working with Business Central for a long time we can find something new and interesting and this is my case.

Recently I've took part in a project - adding some new functionality to SaaS Business Central. But the environment's link was quite different from standard

https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/TenantId/Sandbox

It was:

https://ISVName.bc.dynamics.com/TenantId/Sandbox

It's a vertical solution of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and unfortunately, I've never work with such environments before.

So how to connect your Visual Studio Code and download symbols? I tried the next launch.json setup and set non standard URL as a server parameter:

And this works for symbols downloading! But if you try to publish your app to the environment, you'll see the "Success" message in the VS Code debug console and this window instead of normal web client:

Now look at the URL of this window - it has default beginning - businesscentral.dynamics.com instead of the value you have typed as the server parameter. If you open your environment directly - your app will be there, but when you develop, it's not suitable to open the environment twice and debugging will be not allowed. So how to fix this?

The responsible property name is Application Family. You can see it in your Admin Center for each environment. By default it has Business Central value but will be different for ISV solutions.

And when you develop an app for the ISV solution, in the launch.json file use applicationFamily property with the ISVName element of the environment's URL https://ISVName.bc.dynamics.com/TenantId/Sandbox instead of server parameter.

Hope that this will be useful for you.