We have updated the ALTool with a number of new capabilities:

Launching an AL MCP server that can be used for agentic coding loops from the command line.
Working with workspaces—for example, creating and compiling.
Detecting symbols-only and runtime packages.

Standalone MCP Server provided as part of ALTool

The new AL MCP (AL Model Context Protocol) server allows autonomous agents to interact with an AL workspace. It can be launched via ALTool with the launchmcpserver command. This starts an HTTP-based MCP server, which coding agents can use to invoke AL-specific development tools.

The basic usage is:

al LaunchMcpServer --projects "C:\Users\MyUser\MyALProject"

This launches an MCP server that tracks changes within the MyALProject folder, listens on the specified port for MCP calls, and provides several tools for agents to interact with the loaded projects.

Workspace compilation

The ALTool now includes a set of commands for creating and working with multi-project AL workspaces—for example, compiling all projects in a Visual Studio Code workspace in the correct dependency order.

al workspace create my.code-workspace ./src creates a .code-workspace file by recursively searching one or more folders for AL projects (folders containing app.json). Each discovered project is added to the workspace with its name read from the manifest.
al workspace compile my.code-workspace compiles all projects in a workspace in the correct dependency order. The command reads each project's manifest to build a dependency graph, then parallelizes compilations where possible.
al workspace map my.code-workspace output.md generates a Markdown file with a Mermaid dependency diagram from a workspace. The output includes a visual graph of interproject dependencies, a project details table, and warnings for any circular dependencies detected.

Symbol-only and runtime package detection

ALTool now supports detecting whether an app is symbol-only and whether a package is a runtime package. These checks help tools like ALGo determine if an extension can be published to SaaS or containers.

Learn more in ALTool.