Top 5 things I miss in AL

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  • Reading time:14 mins read

The community often criticizes Microsoft for adding new platform features only when Microsoft needed them. Well, it has been a bit too harsh – Microsoft did add improvements in other situations, too. But still, if you compare it to other Microsoft’s languages like TypeScript or C#, the AL language isn’t really advancing.

Looking back at C/AL, the AL language has really brought a lot of improvements. We have native JSON types, HTTP API, interfaces, overloads, and a lot more. But still, the overall change of the AL language was minor improvement, rather than a real evolution that transition to VS Code could have allowed.

Here’s the list of top five things I’d absolutely love to see in AL. And I have strong reasons to believe that all of them would be fairly easy to implement for Microsoft. Let’s get started.

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How about Rollback in AL?

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  • Reading time:8 mins read

I’ve never truly understood why we could explicitly commit a transaction, but we could only implicitly roll one back. There is a universe of difference between throwing an error (and ending the call stack), and rolling back (and continuing execution).

There was always a way to roll back and go on, sure. Wrap the entire thing in a if Codeunit.Run() block, throw an error as the last thing inside that codeunit, and there you go. Problem solved. Well, not quite.

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