As shown in the following diagram, the development environment architecture is powered by the Visual Studio extension called Unified Operations. This extension provides the developer, application explorer, X++ code editor, project system, UI designer, debugger, and other tools to extend existing functionalities and add new functionalities. The source code is stored on the development machine filesystem as XML files and is used by the metadata API of the Visual Studio extension for editing and design. You can use the familiar build process developer to build the solution and to create binary assembly files and other deployment artifacts. The X++ debugging experience is integrated with the F5/Run function, which uses the local runtime environment to provide a debug experience. Another important change in development is that the development tools are completely decoupled from any running environment, which means that unlike the earlier versions, you don't need an active application server to write your code:

A new development environment changes the way customization and development is done in earlier versions. The following are the key advantages of using Visual Studio as the development environment for operations:

• Visual Studio is the most popular IDE and the Finance and Operations development tooling can reap benefits for continuous investment and innovations.
• X++ becomes a managed language within Visual Studio; the programming language X++ gets closer to C#, incorporating more and more familiar syntax from C#.
• It's easier than ever to onboard the .NET resources to customize and extend Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations with familiar tooling, programming concepts, and increased interoperability with managed languages.