Dynamics 365 Business Central: download symbols from Microsoft’s public NuGet source.

Everyone of you know that for working with a Dynamics 365 Business Central AL project you need symbols, and symbols are usually downloaded from the Dynamics 365 Business Central environment specified in your launch.json file (yes, there are also developers that share symbols with cut/paste across projects, but that’s another story). This is the most common way of doing that I usually see when meeting various partners.

Few partners know that, starting from AL Language Extension version 17, now you have a new command called AL: Download Symbols from Global Sources.

This new command (availbale from the VS Code Command Palette) allows downloading app packages directly from Microsoft’s public NuGet feeds. Symbols are autyomatically downloaded from the Microsoft NuGet feed accordingly to the version you’ve specified in your app.json file (in the “application” tag).

Here for example I’m using an old 26.5 versiob for my extension:

You can specify the country/region specific package you need directly in the command palette:

The download will start:

and symbols of the corresponging required version will be automatically downloaded into your .alpackages folder:

The feature supports also the possibility to specify country/region-specific packages using the new al.symbolsCountryRegion setting.

You can also configure the usage of custom NuGet feeds by using the new al.customNugetFeeds setting, with also the option to restrict downloads to custom feeds only using the al.useOnlyCustomFeeds setting.

Personally, this is the way I always use, so give it a try…

Original Post https://demiliani.com/2026/02/23/dynamics-365-business-central-download-symbols-from-microsofts-public-nuget-source/