It has become obvious that the future of AL programming is in Visual Studio Code.
Microsoft has made a decision to ship all their releases as Docker Containers.
The result of this is a development machine that does not have any NAV version installed. I wanted to go through the installation and configuration of a new NAV on Docker development machine.
Here is what I did.
I installed Windows Server 2016 with Containers. The other option was to use Windows 10 and install Docker as explained here.
After installing and fully updating the operating system I downloaded and installed Visual Studo Code.
After installation Visual Studio Code detects that I need to install Git.
I selected Download Git and was taken to the Git download page.
I downloaded and installed Git with default settings.
To be able to run NAV Development and NAV Client I need to install prerequisite components. I copied the Prerequisite Components folder from my NAV 2018 DVD and installed some of them…
Let’s hook Visual Studio Code to our NAV 2018 repository and install AdvaniaGIT. I first make sure to always run Visual Studio Code with administrative privileges.
Now that we have our AdvaniaGIT installed and configured we can start our development. Let’s start our C/AL classic development. Where this video ends you can continue development as described in my previous posts on AdvaniaGIT. AdvaniaGIT also supports NAV 2016 and NAV 2017.
Since we are running NAV 2018 we can and should be using AL language and the Extension 2.0 model. Let’s see how to use our repository structure, our already build Docker container and Visual Studio Code to start our first AL project.
So as you can see by watching these short videos it is easy to start developing both in C/AL and AL using AdvaniaGIT and Visual Studio Code.
My next task is to update my G/L Source Names extension to V2. I will be using these tools for the job. More to come soon…
Hi Gunnar,
Very interesting blog you have.
I am trying to come up and running on VS Code and NAV and therefore I am trying out your AdvaniaGIT.
I am following your steps and everything goes fine until I am going to run the Build & Update NAV Environment. In this process i run into a problem.
After initializing the container it says Container Up about a minute and then an error occur.
It says: NEW-PSSession: The input containerId xxxxxxxxxxxx does not exist or the corresponding container is not running.
Do you know by any changes what is going wrong here ?
(I have not installed the prerequisite components)
Hi Mortem
If you execute
Docker ps
Do you see the container healthy and running?
I would retry by executing Remove NAV Environment and Build again
Yes, the container is healthy and running.
The execution to remove NAV environment did not work.
I then removed both the image and the container and ran the build again.
It did not work.
Note that I am running this on local machine with Win10.
I will ready more of your blogs, and maybe I will understand more..
Thanx 🙂