Yearly Archives: 2021

AL Object ID Ninja Scheduled Maintenance Announcement: October 9 at 19:00 CET

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For all of you using AL Object ID Ninja, please read this post. There will be scheduled maintenance of AL Object ID Ninja back end on October 9, 2021, at 19:00 CET (UTC +2). The expected downtime is 30 minutes. During the maintenance, you will not be able to use AL Object ID Ninja to assign object IDs.

Behavior during the maintenance

During the maintenance, the back end will send the 503 Service Unavailable response to all requests. When AL Object ID Ninja receives this status, it will show a message like this:

What is this maintenance about?

In my previous post, I explained the reasons for the maintenance that is going to happen this week. After weighing in and out several approaches, I have come up with a plan slightly different than what I announced in the previous post. So, during this maintenance, the following is going to happen:

  • All existing app information will be moved from a Standard-tier Block Blob container to a Premium-tier Block Blob container. This will provide a slightly better performance, and will reduce the costs by roughly 47%. Standard-tier costs less for volume of stored data, but more per transaction, and since Ninja is using low storage volume with high transaction count, the cost reduction will be substantial.
  • All blobs belonging to an individual app will be consolidated into a single app blob. In “v1” app information is spread around multiple individual blobs which allows slightly faster performance and lower access concurrency. However, benchmarking has shown that there is no substantial performance benefit to existing approach as compared to single-blob-per-app approach. Furthermore, since the back end already correctly handles concurrent access and since chances of actual concurrent write are microscopical, not much is gained by spreading app data across multiple blobs. The overall benefit of having a single blob is substantial, as there will be far less blob read operations as compared to the current situation.
  • After the migration is completed, a new version of back end will be deployed that will return the 410 Gone response to all “v1” requests. This version will have “v2” endpoints available.
  • When the migration starts, a new version of AL Object ID Ninja (2.0.0) will be deployed that will access new “v2” endpoints.

What do you need to do?

After the maintenance completes, you should update AL Object ID Ninja extension as soon as possible. For most of you, this will happen automatically. To make sure everything is ready, verify that AL Object ID Ninja is updated to 1.2.8 in your instance of Visual Studio Code before you first start working after the maintenance.

IMPORTANT (if you have your own back end)

Some of you are using your own back end. I will push the new version of the back end to GitHub latest on Thursday evening. Please keep an eye on the repository. When you see a commit about back end “v2”, pull the changes and deploy them at any point after the scheduled maintenance starts, but before your developers start using AL Object ID Ninja (probably on Monday morning).

Continue ReadingAL Object ID Ninja Scheduled Maintenance Announcement: October 9 at 19:00 CET

Important Announcement for AL Object ID Ninja

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If you are using AL Object ID Ninja already then you may want to read this post. If not, then first install AL Object ID Ninja, then read this post 😀

Since its launch three weeks ago, this extension has exploded far beyond my expectations. As of this morning, Ninja has been installed 5.916 times, there are 2.047 Business Central apps that use Ninja to assign object IDs, and there are currently around 13.37 million blob read and write operations per week performed on my Azure Storage and around 6.75 million Azure Function calls per day. These numbers nearly doubled in the past ten days, and while there is a definite cap to how far this can grow, I expect all of this to grow at a steady rate for the foreseeable future.

Which brings me to the important part. AL Object ID Ninja is free, and it will stay free. Right now there is absolutely no fear of it even remotely approaching the limit I’ve set (at the moment, Ninja is costing on average €1 per day against my €125 monthly allowance that comes with my Visual Studio subscription, so there is aaaaaa lot of room to grow. However, since Ninja grew beyond my wildest dreams already, and since I know it’s far from hitting the roof any time soon, if nothing changes, in a couple of months it could hit a €3 per day threshold that would make me pretty uncomfortable.

That said, I have been working on some important back-end improvements to keep costs (much) lower while providing even more functionality. The reason why I went there wasn’t costs at all – it was actually some new functionality I wanted to add that I realized would drive costs a bit up, so I had to do something.

All of this is to finally announce this important announcement: at some point during the weekend, there will be a major upgrade to the AL Object ID Ninja back end, and over the course of the next week there will be two new versions of AL Object ID Ninja extension. The old extension will not work with new back end, and new extension will not work with old back end.

That’s it. If you care about nitty-gritty details, then read on.

Continue ReadingImportant Announcement for AL Object ID Ninja

AL Object ID Ninja v1.2.0 – plus some Azure lessons learned

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First things first. Yesterday evening, I’ve released AL Object ID Ninja v1.2.0 and there is really nothing new that you’d care about, functionally speaking. Check the changelog if you will, but trust me, you won’t be really blown away. But yes, unfortunately, it did merit a full minor version rather than just a patch number increase.

That’s it. If you only care about what’s new, then this is where you stop reading. But if you care to know what kind of a rocky ride I’ve had yesterday wrestling with Azure and fighting like mad to keep this service free, then read on.

I won this fight, by the way 😎

Continue ReadingAL Object ID Ninja v1.2.0 – plus some Azure lessons learned
Read more about the article AL Object ID Ninja v1.1.0 released

AL Object ID Ninja v1.1.0 released

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I have just released version 1.1.0 of AL Object ID Ninja. Here’s what’s new.

Merge synchronization

In previous versions, you could only synchronize full information. This type of synchronization simply recorded in the back end whatever it finds in the front end. For example, if the back end had object IDs 50100..50105, and the front end only has object IDs 50104..50106, then the full synchronization, will drop whatever was recorded previously, and will replace it with 50104..50106.

This type of synchronization may be good enough for teams who are only just starting development in AL, and have no existing repos. They can just start assigning numbers, and then synchronize later as needed.

However, if you are an active team with dozens of developers working in different branches, and you start using AL Object ID Ninja after objects already exist in your repo, if you only run synchronization from master branch, then any of object IDs already assigned in those other development branches will not be visible to AL Object ID Ninja. Instead of preventing object ID collision, AL Object ID Ninja would lead you right into it in this case.

For all these scenarios, you have Update synchronization.

Continue ReadingAL Object ID Ninja v1.1.0 released
Read more about the article AL Object ID Ninja

AL Object ID Ninja

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One of the biggest obstacles to AL team development (is there any other kind?) is object IDs. IDs are supposed to be easy: just pick the next free one and off you go. AL Language even helps by suggesting the next available one through IntelliSense. But you are most likely not the only developer on your team. As soon as you add another developer to equation, and both of you use the built-in AL IntelliSense auto-suggest feature, you are inevitably heading towards object ID collision. The more developers there are, the more active your repository is, the more likely the collision.

Obviously, without some kind of a back-end that coordinates object ID assignment – preferably in real time – is absolutely necessary. And teams have come up with various solutions to this problem. They include:

  • “Who cares!”: the most heroic one, no object ID collision will ruin your day. Bring it on – you say! I’ll handle you – you say! These teams spend a lot of time resolving collisions post-factum.
  • Object “reservations”: you create an empty object of the desired type, push just that, create a PR that does nothing by that, and launch into the Hail Mary mode until your PR gets merged. The slower your validation pipeline is, the more likely it is that more than one developer will be saying their Hail Marys at the same time, and guess what – Mary will help one of them.
  • “Hey, folks”: you yell to announce to everyone that you are about to take an object ID. Or, in more advanced teams, you run a Teams team (uh, did I mention “team?”). This approach is not too robust, but generally yields better results than the above two.
  • Excel: the ways this tool gets used, geez. It’s a spreadsheet calculator, for Pete’s sake, but people have been using it for everything ranging from shopping lists to, well, object ID assignment sheets.
  • “When you have a hammer, every problem you see is a…” BC! The ways this tool gets used, too! Well, heck, yeah, isn’t it so freaking obvious that people will just create a BC app and deploy it internally so that everyone can use it. BC has nearly all facilities you need (that none of the above approaches does): primary key validation and concurrency. This is a very advanced stage in the evolution of object ID collision management solutions.
  • Automation. Yeah, baby! Now that there is a BC back end, and BC has APIs, let’s build an API that gives you next number, and then let’s do some front-end that fetches that from the back end, and then let’s somehow embed into VS Code. There is at least one tool that I know of, that does exactly this. And good that I didn’t know of it that Saturday morning nine days ago, because I would have zero motivation to take this evolution one big step further.

This is where AL Object ID Ninja joins the show! It’s zero-configuration, crazy-fast, mind-bogglingly simple solution for no-collision object ID assignment in AL. If you haven’t already (and if you are using Waldo’s AL Extension Pack, chances are you already have) go fetch yourself a copy.

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Read more about the article Inside Git: Branches

Inside Git: Branches

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It has again been a while since I blogged – or video-blogged for that matter. I won’t offer any excuses – I’ve been very busy over the past month. I delivered two public webinars, both of which were fully booked and ended up very successful. The first one was Leveraging Git, and it was the first public redelivery since January. The second one was CI/CD from AL Developer’s Shoes, and this was the first iteration of this one that practically consumed all free time I had. That one is to blame for me not blogging or broadcasting for more than four weeks.

Cool, now that I am done with the excuses, it’s time to move on. Today I’ve finally had time to go live again with a new episode of Vjeko.live. Since I am so busy with Git these days (and webinars are only a part of my being busy with Git, in fact), I’ve decided to deliver another short “inside Git” session. This time it was branches, and I went into what branches actually are in Git, how Git stores them, what happens when you create a branch, check out a branch, or delete a branch.

If you missed the live broadcast at 4PM today, you can follow it at your own convenience here:

If you want to learn more about branches, don’t miss my next public webinar in two weeks: Git Branching Models and Strategies.

See you in the cloud!

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Read more about the article Git storage – SHA1

Git storage – SHA1

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If you have ever worked with Microsoft’s Team Foundation version control tools, it wasn’t easy to switch to Git. That’s not because Git was complicated – no, nothing like that at all! It was simply because you had to forget almost everything you thought you knew about version control, and then learn it anew.

There are many fundamental differences between Git and TFVC, and one of the more obvious ones to any newcomer to Git is this:

If it wasn’t obvious on the first go, TFVC is on the left, Git is on the right

No, it’s not about the caption here. Indeed, TFVC calls individual snapshots of changes “changesets” and Git calls them “commits”, but that’s just terminology – the term in itself is not a fundamental difference. I am after something else here.

Continue ReadingGit storage – SHA1
Read more about the article What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Release Wave 1 is out (whoa, that was a mouthful) with some new perks for developers. Today, I had another live session at http://vjeko.live, and I made it both the first one in the series of What’s New for the latest release, as well as the episode four of Fun with Interfaces.

Interfaces are such an amazing feature in AL language, that was long missed, and that’s now saving my day nearly every time I do something with AL. The latest AL compiler (runtime “7.0”) comes with these new interesting features about interfaces:

  • You can mark interfaces for obsoletion.
  • You can mark individual interface functions for obsoletion.
  • You can return interfaces as return type from functions.
  • You can define UnknownValueImplementation for enums to specify the interface that represents any unknown enum values.

Let’s take a look at each one of those with examples.

Continue ReadingWhat’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1
Read more about the article Webinars in the upcoming period

Webinars in the upcoming period

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My last two webinars were a great success, and this is not only judging from my angle. Attendees were very happy with them, and the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive. I’ve got a lot of inquiries about repeating them, and I also got a few ideas for new ones that would allow you to build on top of the knowledge gained in the first two.

So, today I am announcing the schedule for the webinars for the next three months.

Continue ReadingWebinars in the upcoming period
Read more about the article Webinar: CI/CD from AL developer’s shoes

Webinar: CI/CD from AL developer’s shoes

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I am postponing this webinar! It appears that it coincides directly with a webinar held by Arend-Jan Kauffmann, so I’ll announce different dates for this one soon.

This webinar is moved to May, please check the sidebar.

After two very successful webinars about Git internals and Git branching models and strategies, I am now announcing the next one, titled CI/CD from AL developer’s shoes.

When talking about CI/CD, one word typically pops to mind: pipelines. But pipelines is just one aspect of this much wider and bigger topic. Let me just say this: Continuous integration was conceived a long time before anyone was thinking of pipelines. Continuous integration and delivery are sets of practices, a philosophy if you want, that must go through into every pore of the development process before pipelines can make much sense.

And while previous two webinars were almost agnostic of AL, and were presenting Git and related processes from nearly a pure Git perspective, this webinar has AL in central focus, and presents this important topic from the angle of an AL developer.

Continue ReadingWebinar: CI/CD from AL developer’s shoes