Opinion: Is Visual Studio Code the best deal?

Visual Studio Code is coming soon to develop extensions in AL. It is not very comfortable to disagree with Microsoft in a Microsoft blog. At the same time, I thought that these are technological affairs and feed-back could be welcome. I only want to give a respectful and argued opinion about the new development tool.

Another disclaimer: like most of us I am a newcomer in VS Code. I can be wrong or partially inaccurate. Comments will welcome, and I´ll put as corrections as necessary in this text.

Visual Studio Code facts review.

• It´s a free, and open source code editor. It isn´t specific language oriented.
• In “Visual Studio Code” name, the key word is “Code”. So only thing you can do is code. And word “Code”, is stronger than “Visual”. No wizards, no graphical design for pages or reports.
• Another result of “Code” word: doesn´t invoke compilers. The result are text files, not executable files. But there is good news: we can publish .navx from Visual Code editor.
• All the preferences at different levels are set editing JSON text files.
• And the most important: as far, there is no test tool for AL.

The questions.

A new development environment is welcome, but we can ask three questions:

• Are we improving with Visual Studio Code?
• How much are we improving or worsening?
• Do We deserve better tools for AL programming?

Improvement?

I like Visual Studio Code and I am grateful to Microsoft to give this tool to our community. I think VS Code is a smart tool.

Visual Studio Code editor is very powerful (intellisense, replacement), and Git integrated. And my favorite feature: snippets. Snippets can take design with patterns to another level.

So, What´s the problem?

I love pop music, but since I´m working I listen to classic and jazz music to be focused. All this could be about keep personal and professional separate. 

The problem is that I can´t see Visual Studio Code as an enterprise tool. Our target must be to be focused developing functionality, not focused in development tool itself and JSON settings. Remember, Visual Studio Code is for general purpose, not specific language oriented.

I think VS Code is a big deal for short web oriented programs. For big Add-on programs, we need other tools. And this is the Tenerife scenario: a different tool for extensions and other for the rest.

Old vs New.

We improve in only coding tasks, functions in tables and Codeunits.

We can be more uncomfortable putting new fields without graphical environment. When we do a new SQL Server table, we don´t begin to write “CREATE”: we open an spreadsheet in SQL Server managing tool.

Design work of pages and reports could be a little harder.

Snippets are a no brainer advantage, but create new snippets is hard: you have to put all the lines manually quoted and put scape characters in quotes and slides. I miss a “Snippets tool”.

Lack of test tool is a huge disadvantage: mostly developing for a great global market instead develop customizations.

Conclusion

Visual Studio Code is a good tool but, is the better tool for NAV AL? Is very cool program with an open source tool but, is it practical? C# programmers don´t work with Visual Studio Code, work with Visual Studio 2017. Why not a Visual Studio (without “Code”) with AL?