ALbuild for Visual Studio Code

Your Business Central dev loop — pipelines, containers and artifacts, right in the sidebar.

ALbuild brings the ALbuild toolchain into your editor. See the health of your Azure DevOps pipelines, spin up and manage Business Central Docker containers, and browse BC artifacts — without leaving VS Code.

💡 ALbuild is a thin shell over the businessdev.ALbuild PowerShell module (the same engine that powers the ALbuild CI/CD pipeline tasks). It does not re-implement container or artifact logic, so what you see in the editor matches your builds exactly.

📦 NuGet / dependency package management is intentionally out of scope — that's handled by the companion ALGet extension.

✨ Highlights

• 🚦 Pipeline status at a glance — passed, running, warning, failed or never run, matched automatically to your repository.
• 🐳 One-click BC containers — create, start, stop, publish and debug, with live CPU / memory stats.
• 🌐 Artifact browser — find any BC Sandbox/OnPrem artifact, download it, or create a container straight from it.
• 🔐 No tokens to manage — signs in with your Microsoft account.
• 🎯 Native feel — themed icons, status bar health, readable error messages.

🗺️ ALbuild at a glance

🚦 Pipelines

Keep an eye on your builds without opening a browser.

• Live status tree — one node per Azure DevOps pipeline with a color-coded icon: ✔ passed · ◐ running · ▲ warning · ✖ failed · ○ never run — plus the branch and how long ago it ran.
• Recent runs — expand any pipeline to see its last runs; click a run to open it in Azure DevOps.
• Queue a build — start a build for any pipeline and branch from the view title.
• Auto-refresh — polls on a configurable interval, or refresh on demand.
• Zero setup — pipelines are matched to your workspace's git remote (dev.azure.com and legacy *.visualstudio.com). Override the link in albuild.json or settings when you need to.
• Microsoft sign-in — authenticates with your Microsoft account through VS Code; no Personal Access Token required.

🐳 Containers

A full Business Central container workflow, driven by the ALbuild PowerShell module.

• List & control — all your BC containers with running/stopped status and inline start / stop / restart / remove.
• New Container wizard — guided steps for name, country, artifact version, authentication, memory and isolation, plus an optional license.
• Container detail view with live CPU & memory stats (sampled while the view is open) and one-click actions:
  • 🌐 Open the Web Client (trusts the container's self-signed certificate for the current user, so the browser doesn't warn — removed again when the container is removed)
  • 💻 Open a container terminal with the Business Central administration cmdlets pre-loaded (Get-NAVServerInstance & co. ready to use)
  • 📜 Stream logs
  • 👤 Add a user
  • 🧪 Install the Test Toolkit
  • 📦 Publish an app to the container
  • 🚀 Generate launch.json for the AL Language extension

🌐 Artifacts

Browse the Business Central artifact CDN like a first-class catalog.

• Sandbox & OnPrem artifacts grouped by type.
• Filter by country and version (major or major.minor).
• (cached) badge for artifacts already in your local cache.
• ⬇ Download an artifact, or ＋ create a container from it in one step.

🩺 Environment health

A single status-bar item summarizes your environment — Docker, the ALbuild module and Azure DevOps sign-in — and offers one-click fixes when something's missing.

🚀 Getting started

1. Install this extension.
2. Make sure the prerequisites below are in place.
3. Open your AL project / repository folder.
4. Click the ALbuild icon in the Activity Bar.
5. In Pipelines, choose Sign in to Azure DevOps. In Containers, click ＋ to create your first container.

✅ Requirements

⚙️ Settings

Project configuration (albuild.json)

The extension reuses your existing albuild.json keys (country, artifactType, bcVersion, select) and adds an optional devops block to pin the pipeline link per repository:

{
  "country": "de",
  "artifactType": "Sandbox",
  "select": "Latest",
  "devops": {
    "organization": "your-org",
    "project": "Your Project",
    "pipelineId": 42
  }
}

🧭 Commands

All commands are available from the Command Palette under the ALbuild: prefix — for example Sign in to Azure DevOps, Queue Build, New BC Container, Publish App to Container, Generate launch.json, Resolve Dependencies, Download Artifact and Re-check Environment.

🛟 Troubleshooting

• "module was not found" — install businessdev.ALbuild or point albuild.module.path at it (or open the ALbuild repo, where it is auto-detected).
• "Docker is not available" — start Docker, then click Re-check environment in the status bar.
• No pipelines listed — confirm you're signed in and the workspace has an Azure DevOps git remote, or set albuild.devops.* / the albuild.json devops block.

All failures are surfaced as a single, readable message; full detail is in the ALbuild output channel (View → Output → ALbuild).

🔒 Privacy

ALbuild runs entirely on your machine. It talks only to your Docker daemon, the Business Central artifact CDN, and your Azure DevOps organization. No telemetry is collected by this extension.

🤝 Related

• ALbuild PowerShell module & Azure DevOps tasks — the CI/CD side of the same toolchain.
• ALGet — NuGet / dependency package management for AL.

📄 License

Licensed under the MIT License.