Monthly Archives: October 2014

Read more about the article Directions EMEA 2014 content
Poznan

Directions EMEA 2014 content

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One more great Directions EMEA event is over, and it was a great experience again. I am a bit sorry, though, that my main focus was delivering presentations, so I enjoyed myself less mingling around, meeting new folks and consuming content. But it was still a great event.

What I liked a lot is the audience participation and the interest – all sessions, at least those that I attended or delivered, were packed full. It was a real pleasure presenting and demoing tips and tricks in my “Spicing up your user interface” session, and ranting about barriers and gaps between consultants and developers in my “Breaking the barriers” session. Thank you all who attended and I hope it was worth your time.

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NavUserAccountHelper class

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Even though my blog queue has a lot of far more interesting todo entries waiting for their prime time, on my short flight to the Directions EMEA conference in Poznań, instead of dozing away or blank-staring through the window, I’ve decided to introduce the Microsoft.Dynamics.Nav.NavUserAccount.NavUserAccountHelper class, a part of the built-in .NET stack of Microsoft Dynamics NAV since the version 2013 R2. My friend, Eric, asked me to blog about it, so here it is, this post is for you, Eric.

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Three Whys about .NET Interoperability

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Once upon a time, a smart bloke named Saikichi Toyoda came up with a 5 Whys troubleshooting technique. It postulates that you only need to ask “why” five times to get to the root cause of any problem in a cause-and-effect sequence.

However, with .NET Interoperability in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (pick your version here), I’ve only had to ask “why” three times today, and unfortunately I could not get to the root cause, except – poor design decisions.

It all has to do with a simple .NET class: System.DBNull. The first “why” is simple: why is there no support for fields on .NET types. The second “why” is even simpler: why don’t we have a null constant in C/AL. And the last “why” downright falls into the “what the heck” category: why did somebody think it was a smart idea to replace DBNull value with null.

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Request page automation in NAV 2015

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Most of What’s New information about NAV 2015 will mostly talk about the Word report layouts, as well as the C/AL support for these. However, most of the What’s New documentation doesn’t have a single word about what I find among the most exciting new reporting features in C/AL: the capability to programmatically control the request pages.

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Quick Reporting Tip

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Use Labels (View > Labels) instead of data columns for captions in your reports.  It’s amazing how much you save in terms of data transfer. And your Data Set looks better too. Microsoft, why don’t you use this consistently on your standard reports?

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How I Reduced Data Upgrade Time By 78 Hours

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Upgrade projects are lots of fun. They are full of challenges that keep you busy day and night all the time.

I have encountered a very interesting challenge on my last upgrade project. The object upgrade process was completed, the data upgrade procedure ready to go, but when we started first tests we realized that the data upgrade execution takes some 39 hours to complete just Step 1. Without even bothering to measure Step 2, we realized we need to do something about it. The customer is running a 24/7 business, and cannot accommodate for such a large downtime, just to upgrade data from NAV 2009 R2 to NAV 2013 R2.

Eventually, we got it down to under a second. If you want to learn how, read on.

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