BC ALM — Business Central Copilot Template Manager

Give your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central team a ready-made set of GitHub Copilot agents, skills, prompts and instructions, and keep it up to date.

BC ALM takes them from the BC ALM template, or from your own company template, and installs them into your AL projects:

• Your project values: they are filled in with your app prefix, object ID range and repository.
• Safe updates: it shows what changed upstream, and updates without overwriting your own edits.
• Sharing back: you can contribute improvements back as pull requests.

Preview. BC ALM is new. Please report anything odd in GitHub issues.

Features

• Start fast: create a new BC project from a template, or add BC ALM to an existing repository. Prefix, object range, publisher and work-item system (Azure DevOps or GitHub) are prefilled from app.json and your git remote.
• Components view: every agent, skill, prompt, instruction, workflow and doc, with its status:
  • up to date
  • update available
  • modified
  • conflict
  • custom
  • disabled
• Updates that respect your edits:
  • Unchanged files update in one click.
  • Files you edited get a 3-way merge, keep mine or reset.
  • Your project values are re-applied automatically.
• Pick what you use: install, disable or pin ("always keep my version") single components, or choose them per template.
• Several templates side by side: for example BC ALM plus a BC upgrade template. Turn whole templates on or off.
• Template catalogs:
  • Browse several templates in one repository.
  • Build variants that extend a template.
  • Follow latest, a pinned version or a branch.
• Your own company template:
  • Copy (fork, duplicate or independent copy) a template into your own repository.
  • Save customized components to it.
  • Keep it in sync with upstream.
  • Contribute improvements back as a pull request (through a fork when you can't push).
• Authoring help: scaffolds for new agents, skills, prompts and instructions. Live diagnostics with quick fixes against current Copilot guidance. Review with Copilot.
• Guidance & What's New: a best-practices guide, the template's change log since your version, and Copilot updates from the GitHub changelog.

Getting started

1. Install BC ALM, either way:
   • from the Extensions view (search for BC ALM);
   • or from a terminal: code --install-extension AlexanderErdelyi.bc-alm.
2. Open a folder. Use an empty folder for a new project, or your existing AL repository. Trust the folder when VS Code asks.
3. Open the BC ALM view in the Activity Bar, then pick one:
   • New Project from Template… creates and initializes a new project.
   • Add BC ALM to This Repository… adds the template to an existing repo.
   • Add Template Source… / Browse Templates… adds your company's template or a catalog.
4. Check the Components view. It shows your agents, skills and prompts. When the template changes, they show update available.

Projects created before the extension existed: run Record Template Baseline once.

Full guide: docs/vscode-extension.md

Requirements

• VS Code 1.95 or newer, in a trusted workspace. BC ALM is disabled in Restricted Mode and in virtual workspaces, because it runs local tools.
• git on PATH.
• PowerShell (pwsh 7 recommended; Windows PowerShell 5.1 works). It is needed to create a project or add BC ALM to one, because those steps run the template's setup scripts.
• GitHub CLI (gh), signed in with gh auth login. It is needed for pull requests, forks, creating templates and fork sync. Reading public templates works without it.
• GitHub Copilot to actually use the agents, skills and prompts in your project.

Commands

All commands are in the Command Palette under BC ALM: and in the BC ALM views.

Settings

Privacy and security

• No telemetry. BC ALM does not collect or send usage data.
• Network access:
  • It contacts only the template repositories you configure, using your own git and gh credentials.
  • It also reads the What's New feed (bcAlm.whatsNew.feedUrl, the GitHub Changelog by default).
• It runs local tools: git, the GitHub CLI and PowerShell. When you create or add a project, it runs the template's own setup scripts (scripts/*.ps1), so only use templates you trust.
• Credentials: tokens and user:password@ parts of URLs are masked before anything is written to the BC ALM output channel or shown in a message.
• Writes stay inside the project folder. Writes to the project are refused if a path resolves outside it.
• bcAlm.powershellPath is a machine-level setting, so a repository's workspace settings cannot change which executable runs.

Support

• Questions, bugs and ideas: GitHub issues.
• Security problems: report them privately, as described in SECURITY.md.
• Contributing: see CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Release notes: CHANGELOG.
• License: MIT.
• Like BC ALM? You can support its development through GitHub Sponsors, or with a ⭐ on the repository.