With a few exceptions, all of the development for NAV 2017 applications takes place within the C/SIDE environment. Exceptions include use of Visual Studio (or SQL Server Report Builder) for reporting as we saw in Chapter 5, Queries and Reports, plus the work we may do in a .NET language to create compatible add-ins. While it is possible, development using a text editor is only appropriate for special cases of modifications to existing objects by an advanced developer.

As an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), C/SIDE provides us with a reasonably full set of tools for our C/AL development work. While C/SIDE is not nearly as fully featured as Microsoft's Visual Studio, it is not intended to be a general-purpose one size fits all development toolkit. Most importantly, C/SIDE and C/AL are designed for NAV- compatible business application software development with many features and functions specifically designed for business application work.

like), the one and only C/AL compiler, integration with the application database, and tools to export and import objects both in compiled format and as formatted text files.

C/SIDE includes a smart editor (it knows C/AL, though sometimes not as much as we would like), the one and only C/AL compiler, integration with the application database, and tools to export and import objects both in compiled format and as formatted text files. We'll explore each of these C/SIDE areas in turn, starting with the Object Designer.