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Business Central Development

AL Extension for VS Code on ARM Devices: A Known Problem and Possible Solutions

The AL Extension for VS Code is a popular tool for developing Dynamics 365 Business Central applications. However, there is a known problem with the AL Extension for VS Code that affects ARM devices like the MacBook Pro M2.

Introduction

The AL Extension for VS Code is a popular tool for developing Dynamics 365 Business Central applications. It provides a number of features that make it easier to write, debug, and deploy AL code, such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and IntelliSense.

However there is a known problem on ARM devices that you can’t connect to your Business Central instance.

This problem can be frustrating for developers who want to use their ARM devices for developing Dynamics 365 Business Central applications. It is also a concern for businesses that are considering moving to ARM devices.

In this blog post, we will discuss the problem in more detail and explore some possible solutions.

Problem

Let’s say you are working on a MacBook Pro with M2 which is definetly a ARM device. The normal process would be you’d visit the website to download Visual Studio Code and just simply install and then install the AL extension from the plugins part.

After this you create a new project and want to connect to your sandbox. Doing that a dialog should appear in the lower right corner where you’ll be redirected to log into the business central instance you want to use.

BUT on ARM devices this dialog won’t appear. I searched like half a day for the solution and tried a lot of stuff on the Mac. After all this time I found a comment in a GitHub Issue where one says

The extension is only compiled and built for x64 systems and not ARM.

Solution

Now the solution is different for different platforms.

MacBook Pro M2

1st idea

The idea is to install VSCode for x64 and not arm which I downloaded and installed before. The following steps should be enough to make it run:

  1. Enable rosetta which will be used to run x64 on arm Macs. Open a terminal and paste the following line:
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/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
  1. Download the correct version (x64) from the website
  2. Right-Click on VsCode and open the information window.
  3. Select Open with Rosetta
  4. Install the extension and it should work as expected

2nd idea

Should this not work for you the following will definetly work. So here is another solution:

  1. Enable rosetta which will be used to run x64 on arm Macs. Open a terminal and paste the following line:
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/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
  1. Install hombrew but with x64:
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arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
  1. Install vscode with homebrew:
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arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew install {{vscode or visual-studio-code}}
  1. Open VsCode, install the extension and it should work.

Conclusion

I think that the extension should be available for arm devices as many developers use them. I don’t understand why this is still a problem. Currently I could only check this on a mac but I will definetly see if this works correctly on windows and linux systems.