Dynamics 365 Business Central February 2019 Dev Preview is full AL: how to create extensions now?

As publicly announced yesterday, the February 2019 Developer Preview for Dynamics 365 Business Central launches the first public version of the application where all the base code is converted from C/AL to AL.

If you open the old C/SIDE Development Environment, what you can immediately see is that you’ve only few system tables and system codeunits but no other application objects:

No standard tables, pages, reports, queries, codeunits, XMLports etc. :

Now all the base code is in a single AL extension called BaseApp (actually a monolithic app with about 6000 files):

If you want to create an extension for this new “absolutely alpha” application version and be able to have the symbols, ACTUALLY (and I repeat, actually!!!) you need to do two things:

• In your app.json file, add the dependency from the Microsoft’s BaseApp
• Remove the “application”: “14.0.0.0” line

Your app.json should be:

Now you will be able to have the symbols and (expecially) no strange errors during compilation:

All will be more stable for sure in the next releases (this is a preview ) but with these tricks in mind you will not loose too much time on troubleshooting strange errors from Visual Studio Code.