I am a Business Central consultant-do I need to know anything about programming in AL?

Or you could also, ”as I am an AL developer, do I need to know anything about Business Central functionality?”

I think the answer to both those questions are yes. As consultants, we need to know something about how the development process around Business Central is. In my opinion, that will simply make you able to deliver better Business Central projects. It will make the discussions with your developer easier because you have some kind of common ground for discussion.

But how much is enough knowledge. Should any consultant be able to write AL and create extensions to Business Central?

Well, it is difficult to learn anything if you do not get your hands dirty, and it is difficult to maintain a competency if you do now practice it for a while. For most people – learning to write code is not like learning to ride a bicycle. Learn it once and you will never forget it. It is a competency that needs to be maintained and repeated. We are also working with products and technology that is changing and evolving faster than ever before. So in my eyes, every Business Consultant should spend some hours every moth to play around in AL.

• What are the basics AL / developer tasks you should be able to do?

  • Upload an app into your Business Central environment

  • Create a basic AL project in Visual Code

  • Learn what a repository is and how you can store your repository in GIT

  • Know what objects type we are working with in Business Central

  • Write simple page and report extensions

Please comment below if you think I should write blog posts on each of these subjects seen from a consultants' perspective.