[Idea] Support prerelease NuGet packages in InstallMissingDependencies

[Chris Blank (ChrisBlankDe)]

Idea Description

Summary

AL-Go currently has no way to include prerelease/preview NuGet packages when resolving missing dependencies during a build. Adding a new AL-Go setting — allowPrereleaseNuGetPackages — would close this gap with minimal effort, since the underlying BcContainerHelper functions already support it.

Current behavior

When InstallMissingDependencies runs in RunPipeline.ps1, it calls Publish-BcNuGetPackageToContainer and Download-BcNuGetPackageToFolder without passing -allowPrerelease. This means prerelease packages are always excluded, even if the user intentionally publishes prerelease versions to their NuGet feed.

$publishParams = @{
    "nuGetServerUrl" = ...
    "packageName"   = $appId
    "version"       = $version
    "select"        = $settings.nuGetFeedSelectMode
    # -allowPrerelease is never forwarded
}

Desired behavior

A new boolean AL-Go setting, e.g.:

"allowPrereleaseNuGetPackages": true

When set to true, AL-Go would pass -allowPrerelease to both Publish-BcNuGetPackageToContainer and Download-BcNuGetPackageToFolder inside the InstallMissingDependencies scriptblock.

Motivation / use case

Teams that maintain internal NuGet feeds often publish prerelease packages (e.g. 1.2.3-preview) during development and want CI builds to resolve dependencies against those packages before a stable release is cut. Without this setting, CI fails to find the dependency and the build breaks.

Proposed implementation

1. Add "allowPrereleaseNuGetPackages" = $false to the defaults in ReadSettings.psm1.
2. Add the corresponding entry to settings.schema.json with a description and "type": "boolean".
3. In RunPipeline.ps1, conditionally add -allowPrerelease to $publishParams when the setting is true:

   if ($settings.allowPrereleaseNuGetPackages) {
       $publishParams["allowPrerelease"] = $true
   }

4. Document the new setting in settings.md.

The change is fully backwards-compatible — the default is false, preserving existing behaviour.

Note: AI only helped me phrase this text. The thoughts and ideas behind it are my own.

Contribution (Optional)

• I would be open to contributing to this idea (implementation, documentation, testing, etc.)