Daily Archives: December 6, 2019

Read more about the article Code annotations in AL – Please, don’t!

Code annotations in AL – Please, don’t!

  • Reading time:10 mins read

One of good practices of writing C/AL Code for Microsoft Dynamics NAV since the dawn of civilization was annotating (commenting) code changes. If you are not sure what I mean by that, this is what I am talking about:

While standards varied about > vs +, or < vs -, or what the annotations should include, there was absolute consensus that annotating changes is an absolute must.

And it was a must. It was such an important rule that everyone followed it without questions asked. In my career, I’ve seen one or two situations of somebody changing or deleting a line of code without leaving any comment, and I’ve seen quite a lot of code, believe you me. It was that important.

It was that important in fact that it was one of the first things developers learned when they signed up for the job, and it was one of the rules they all followed from their first day.

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Control Add-ins Supercharged: Debugging with source maps

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So far I’ve shown how to configure gulp to help you with some basic JavaScript development tasks, such as bundling and minifying, and how to automate builds on every source file change. Let’s now take it to an entirely new level: debugging.

If you ever tried to debug your control add-in source code using Visual Studio Code, you might have realized two things: first, that it’s actually pretty simple to do; and second, that it’s not the kind of debugging that you want.

Let’s see why that is.

First, using VS Code with a browser such as Chrome, Edge (especially “Canary”, mmmm) or Firefox is easy. There are debugging extensions built for that purpose that allow you to either launch a browser with VS Code attached as a debugger, or to attach VS Code to a running instance of a browser (some browser configuration needed beforehand). However, when you use VS Code as a debugger like this, it’s hardly more than a glorified browser built-in developer tool – the only benefit of using VS Code is that, well, you are in VS Code, rather than inside the browser. However, you are not really debugging your source files – you are debugging scripts currently loaded in the browser. You can’t set debug breakpoints in your source files – you can only set them in copies of files that are loaded by the browser. If you catch a bug (kind of a point with a debugger) you can’t stop the process and immediately change the line where the bug is, but you have to first locate the matching source script, and then the offending line, and then fix it there. Not exactly a fun pastime.

And that’s annoying enough if you have a single script to work with, but if you have several scripts, bundled together, then minified, well, good luck with that. Debugging minified code is as close as you can get to inquisition-level torture in this century.

So, let’s fix this mess, and let’s enable debugging as it should be – let’s enable debugging of actual source files with full breakpoint integration and all.

That’s what my next branch is about. In it, I introduce source maps and how you can use gulp to build them. And then I explain how you can configure your VS Code to debug your source files.

So, head over to https://github.com/vjekob/supercharged_01/tree/06-gulp-debug and check out some pretty cool stuff.

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