Understanding C/SIDE

With a few exceptions, all of the development for NAV 2013 applications takes place within the C/SIDE environment. Exceptions include use of Visual Studio for reporting as we saw in Chapter 5, Queries and Reports, plus work you might do in a .NET language to create compatible add-ins. While it is possible to do development in Text mode using a text editor, that approach is only appropriate for special cases of modifications to existing objects.

As an Integrated Development Environment, C/SIDE provides us with a reasonably full set of tools for our C/AL development work. While C/SIDE is not nearly as fully featured as Microsoft's Visual Studio, it is not intended to be a general purpose "one size fits all" development toolkit. Most importantly, C/SIDE and C/AL are designed for business application software development with a lot of features and functions specifically designed for business applications work.

C/SIDE includes a smart editor (it knows C/AL, though sometimes...