How to develop with NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central Extensions using real-time collaboration

As part of its news push around Build 2018, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Live Share is now in preview. The new features are intended to support developers to securely collaborate, real time, with other team members to debug and edit code directly from pre-existing systems. According to Microsoft, developers can use "Live Share with any language for any scenario," including Internet of Things development, cloud-native, or serverless computing.

Microsoft MVP and NAV developer Stefano Demiliani has been quick to dive into the new collaborative features. Visual Studio Live Share as it relates to AL development.

Live Share gives developers the opportunity to share a collaboration session with co-workers, thus writing code in real-time. To access the new features, users open Visual Studio Code and the Extensions Marketplace and install a VS Live Share extension.

Demiliani explained that to get Live Share working, Visual Studio Code will need to be restarted and users will be prompted to sign-in. A sign-in will be required every time a collaborative session is launched so that users can identify one another. The program will ask users to authenticate with a corporate account, Microsoft personal account, AAD or GitHub. After logging in, users will see a share button, which launches a Live Share session. He added that some users may be asked by their desktop firewall software to allow a port to open for Live Share, the first time sharing. Demiliani said that this is optional but enables a more secure direct mode with better performance.

"In my opinion, this is a killer feature for Visual Studio and especially for developing extensions with AL. I recommend install[ing] it on your ...