Quick Tip: Use Github Copilot & Chat in VSCode with AL

To assist you when developing AL objects in VSCode, there are two very interesting extensions I can recommend:

• GitHub Copilot
  
• GitHub Copilot Chat
  

GitHub Copilot provides autocomplete-style suggestions from an AI pair programmer as you code. You can receive suggestions from GitHub Copilot either by starting to write the code you want to use, or by writing a natural language comment describing what you want the code to do.

GitHub Copilot Chat is a companion extension to GitHub Copilot that houses preview Chat features.

Here’s a short demo:

Want to know more, then look here:

• GitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer
• Quickstart for GitHub Copilot – GitHub Docs

There are so many nice features these extensions bring to VSCode. Also for example when you create a new empty .al file, you get this question:

Next simply describe what you need and it will generate ‘something’ in AL. Ok, the result is not always correct, but it depends of course on the code you already have in your project and GitHub repos.

I use the suggestions quite a lot, for example when I need to add ToolTips to fields in pages 😉