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We’re proud to announce the availability of the ALAppExtensions repository on GitHub. The repository serves as a platform that enables our active partner and customer communities to develop extensions in the AL language in cooperation with Microsoft or even other partners.
Why is this important? We’re steadily making the core application thinner, more extensible, and easier to localize by extracting areas of application business logic to extensions. This is true for add-ons and localizations. For example, we recently turned the local functionality for Denmark into four separate extensions, making it much easier to update regulatory features when requirements change.
We’ll publish the code in the ALAppExtensions repository so it’s open for your contributions. For example, you can use our extensions as starting points for vertical solutions of your own, or as samples for developing extensions in the AL language in general. Even if you aren’t ready to contribute, you can still use the source code to make changes locally, or just to explore it to see what’s going on.
Over time the source code will become available for more and more extensions, but to start with we’re about to publish it for three extensions:
Getting to the code
Interested? Go take a look. You can find the repository at https://github.com/Microsoft/ALAppExtensions. You don’t need to be a GitHub user to download files. Just go to the repository, choose Clone or download, and then Download ZIP.
If you’re new to the world of AL development, check out the guidance in the Business Central developer content.
Our documentation is also open source
The ALAppExtensions repository is great for code, but what if you want to document your new extension? Our documentation is also open source and available on GitHub. You can find it in the dynamics365smb-docs repository. Just like the source code, you can download our Help content to make it your own and share it with others if you want. The repository offers information about writing in markdown, and the readme.md file gives you step-by-step guidance for extending and customizing our content.