Blog

April. There is definitely something upside down with this month. I’ve started it with a somewhat ambitious decision to blog a post a day. And it worked. Kind of. For the first eight days, anyway.

And then it happened. Suddenly I’ve found myself blogging only occasionally, practically chasing my promise to deliver a blog post twice a week. And boy did it feel like delivery, every single time. At first I thought it was about me, but it seems it wasn’t. All of NAV blogosphere was dormant in April.

Probably the most important event in April 2009 for Microsoft Dynamics NAV in EMEA region was Directions EMEA 2009. I didn’t attend it so I didn’t blog about it, but many other bloggers did. Practically half the NAV blogs’ content in April was directly or indirectly related to this conference or its sessions.

Let me start with Bugsy’s Blog, the newest arrival to NAV blogosphere, which debuted this month by giving a two part walkthrough of SharePoint integration with NAV 2009 through Web Services. This double post is based on a Directions session and shows with a pretty nice example how simple it is to expose your NAV business logic through a familiar web-based interface. Please, be so kind to read Part 1 and Part 2, which won’t only be worth your time, but there is no better way to wish a blogger a warm welcome than by visiting their blog.

Another blog, that of Mark Brummel, did a big comeback in April, delivering seven useful technical articles explaining some intrinsics of NAV on SQL Server. I believe all the posts are worth your attention, and listing all seven doesn’t make much sense, so I simply give you the link to his April archive – go check it, and find out if there is something for you there.

In April, Microsoft has published the Performance Guide for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 which is available to partners through PartnerSource. It has grabbed attention of several bloggers, including my friend Dave’s Gaspode’s Brain Dump, Stefan’s Dynamics NAV Blog and Microsoft Dynamics UK Blog, although it’s nowhere close to the Hardware Sizing guide we are all so used to. Dave’s blog post about this document is totally aligned with what I think of it, and gives a nice insight into what this document lacks and what is good about it.

Plataan posted a true gem about how to leverage fields grouping functionality of page objects in NAV 2009 here. It’s so good that I envy those guys a little bit that I didn’t come up with that idea when I was writing my book.

Finally, I conclude with Waldo’s blog which never disappoints. This month, it brought a nice article about form transformation tool, a piece of software I personally very much dislike, but blog posts like this make me slowly change my opinion. In well-known Waldo’s style, it’s useful, full of cross-references and links and is an excellent starting point if you want to get familiar or learn about this somewhat user-unfriendly, but extremely useful tool. Check it out here.

That’s not all folks. There have been other posts on other blogs out there, not too many of them though, mostly building upon their previous articles or giving you updates to their existing tools, examples or demos. All in all, there have been better months in NAV blogosphere than April 2009, so let’s hope May changes all this. Enjoy it!