Yearly Archives: 2015

A few thoughts around assembly naming and versioning for NAV

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Are you developing .NET assemblies intended to be used from C/AL? If so, then you must have realized that keeping proper track of them and managing them on the server (or client, in case you still do that) is not a simple affair.

Assemblies in .NET are identified through their fully qualified name, and that’s how NAV tells one assembly from another, as well. Fully qualified name contains the assembly name, version, public key token, and culture information. A good practice in .NET development is that when you update assembly’s functionality, you also version that assembly up, essentially resulting in a completely new assembly, which doesn’t have the same fully qualified name as the older version did.

However, this kind of change is a breaking change. In .NET, it’s not all that breaking – you simply reference the new version and this applies to whole project. Or whole solution, depending on how you configure the MSBuild behavior.

But in NAV, it’s a completely different story. Versioning an assembly up is a very breaking change. In NAV, we cannot simply replace a reference once, and then have it apply to the whole database. Unfortunately, we have to update a reference on every single variable, and if you ever had to do it, chances are you don’t keep any happy memories about this experience.

That’s why NAV developers, when working in .NET, prefer not versioning up. And that’s wrong.

Continue ReadingA few thoughts around assembly naming and versioning for NAV
Read more about the article NAV TechDays 2015 sessions available on Mibuso and YouTube

NAV TechDays 2015 sessions available on Mibuso and YouTube

  • Reading time:1 min read

If you didn’t have a chance to attend NAV TechDays 2015 in Antwerp last month, don’t worry – you won’t miss much, at least as the conference content goes.

As always, Luc has published all the conference content on both Mibuso and YouTube, so you can download it for offline use or watch it online. Either way, it’s all must-see content.

Download from Mibuso: http://mibuso.com/downloads/category/navtechdays2015

Watch at YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeFUrL4JZsOa39TQVmrw2ww

Of course, the first session you’ll want to watch is mine, about client add-ins, so here’s the direct link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCNdJJzI2kw

As I said during the session, I plan to dig deeper into the concepts I explained there, when I find time. And time is so difficult to find, or maybe I am looking at all the wrong places?

Continue ReadingNAV TechDays 2015 sessions available on Mibuso and YouTube

Getting out of the DateTime mess, or how to get Utc DateTime in C/AL

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Today at work I was trying to untangle one big bowl of spaghetti called DateTime. It’s the C/AL DateTime I am talking about, not System.DateTime from .NET.

The problem with C/AL DateTime is that no matter what you do it’s, according to documentation, “always displayed as local time”.

Another problem with C/AL DateTime is that C/AL is a bit rude when it comes to System.DateTime: whenever C/AL compiler (or runtime) encounters a value of System.DateTime it’s automatically converted to C/AL DateTime.

When you combine those two problems, you get the following problem: even though System.DateTime is perfectly capable of handling time in both UTC or local kind, C/AL isn’t.

To prove this point, just run this:

MESSAGE(‘Current local time: %1\Current UTC time: %2’,SystemDateTime.Now,SystemDateTime.UtcNow);

It will show this:

image

And I am currently sitting in a UTC+1 time zone, mind you.

Continue ReadingGetting out of the DateTime mess, or how to get Utc DateTime in C/AL

Visual Studio Control Add-in Project Template

  • Reading time:2 mins read

If part of your daily job includes creating control add-ins for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, then you know that creating control add-ins that target all clients requires quite a lot manual work. There are a lot of small steps that you must do every time.

To avoid all that work that adds no value, only frustration, here’s a Visual Studio project template that you can use to automate the process of creating a new control add-in.

Continue ReadingVisual Studio Control Add-in Project Template

Deploying from Visual Studio, update

  • Reading time:3 mins read

A few days ago I have published my PowerShell script that streamlines and automates deployment of control add-ins from Visual Studio. Over the past couple of days I have improved it a little bit, and fixed a few bugs, so here’s an updated version that is more resilient to your project structure, produces resource zips that NST not only extracts, but actually understands, and does a little more.

Continue ReadingDeploying from Visual Studio, update

NAV TechDays 2015 wrap up

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Another NAV TechDays is over, and this one was the best so far. 950 people from all over the world all passionate about NAV and technology and eager to learn and share and discuss the latest in NAV. It was amazing, Luc did a great job again, and I am looking forward to the next year, hoping this conference makes it beyond 1000 attendees.

This year I have delivered a yet another “Black Belt” session named “Client Add-ins Black Belt: bringing .NET and JavaScript together” and as promised, I deliver the session material here on my blog.

Continue ReadingNAV TechDays 2015 wrap up

Out-of-transaction database writes

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Ancient wisdom goes that you cannot have more than one write transaction going on at the same time in a single session in NAV.

This is absolutely true, in and out.

Some features, like Activity Log, will leave you wanting to be able to write to the database outside of the normally running transaction.

Wouldn’t it just be beautiful if you could:

  • Write to the database, and then persist the change to the database even if an error happens during the transaction? (without cough! TryFunction, cough! cough!);
  • Not cause any locks to remain at the target table for any longer than it takes to do the write itself, without having to call COMMIT on your “regular” transaction; and
  • Not use temporary tables, because a system error (however unlikely) could cause the data to not be persisted if crash happens before temporary table is flushed to the physical one.

Well, in fact, you can do this.

Continue ReadingOut-of-transaction database writes

Activity Log or Activity Lock pattern?

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Today at NAV TechDays 2015 in Antwerp, I attended a presentation by Nikola Kukrika, Ciprian Iordache, and Gary Winter, at which Ciprian presented a new design pattern based on a new feature in NAV 2016: Activity Log.

In a nutshell, this new feature, and thus the design pattern, aim at helping trace issues and facilitate troubleshooting by leaving information in the database about what was done, by whom, if it failed, and if it did, why.

All pretty and nice, but – as Ciprian pointed out – there is a bad aspect about it: when an error happens, and everything is rolled back – the activity entry is rolled back together with everything else. Nikola later explained how this could be solved through writing into temporary tables, but this either requires redesign by Microsoft or special coding techniques by you.

However, there is a bigger caveat than this. Non-persisting data in case of errors is a problem, but the bigger problem lies elsewhere. Let me explain that bigger problem here, and then give a silver-bullet solution to solve it all.

Continue ReadingActivity Log or Activity Lock pattern?

Deploying control add-ins during development in NAV 2016

  • Reading time:13 mins read

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 brings many new features, one of which is a set of PowerShell cmdlets to manage add-ins. These are:

While these cmdlets are certainly useful for installation and deployment, I find them even more useful during development. When I blogged about deploying resource files automatically during development some months ago, I showed how you could use PowerShell during build process in Visual Studio to invoke a codeunit that registers control add-ins. Now, in NAV 2016, these tasks are a lot simpler with these new cmdlets.

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Sorting out the DLL hell, Part 3: The Code

  • Reading time:11 mins read

[Update, February 8, 2016: there is a new version of code from this post. Please check https://vjeko.com/dynamically-loading-assemblies-at-runtime]

Okay here we go. In this post I deliver the promised code that handles automatic deployment of all your assemblies to client and server, as needed.

For any of you who haven’t read the last two posts, I am talking about automatically deploying .NET assemblies to clients and server, from the database, on demand, at runtime.

This will be heavy on code, so fasten your seatbelt and brace for impact.

Continue ReadingSorting out the DLL hell, Part 3: The Code