AL programming language

The language in which Business Central is coded is AL. A small sample of AL code within the AL Editor is shown here:

AL syntax is similar to Pascal syntax. Code readability is always enhanced by careful programmer attention to structure and logical variable naming, and ensuring that the process flow is consistent with that of the code in the base product and that there is good documentation both inside and outside of the code.

Good software development focuses on design before coding and accomplishing design goals with a minimal amount of code. Dynamics Business Central facilitates that approach. In 2012, a team made up of Microsoft and Business Central community members began the Business Central design patterns project. As defined by Wikipedia, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem. The following links provide information on the Business Central design patterns project:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nav/archive/2013/08/29/what-is-the-nav-design-patterns-project.aspx
• https://community.dynamics.com/nav/w/designpatterns/default.aspx
• https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/learning-dynamics-nav-patterns

One of the primary goals of this project is to document patterns that exist within Business Central. In addition, new best practice patterns have been suggested as ways to solve common issues we encounter during our customization efforts. Now, when we work on Business Central enhancements, we will be aided by references to the documentation of patterns within Business Central. This allows us to spend more of our time designing a good solution using existing, proven procedures (the documented patterns) and spend less time writing and debugging code. A good reference for Business Central design and development using patterns can be found here: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/microsoft-dynamics-nav-2013-application-design.

You can refer to the Reusing Code section of Business Central at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dynamicsnav-2009/dd355277(v=nav.60).

Much of our Business Central development work is done by assembling references to previously defined objects and procedures, adding new data structures where necessary. As the tools for Business Central design and development that are provided both by Microsoft and by the Business Central community continue to mature, our development work becomes more oriented toward design and less toward coding. The end result is that we are more productive and cost-effective on behalf of our customers. Everyone wins.