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Exporting tasks from gulpfile.js

Post published:February 4, 2019
Post comments:1 Comment
Reading time:9 mins read

In my last post I covered the very basics of getting started with gulp in VS Code. It was all about getting gulp up and running under the hood of VS Code, and about writing your very first gulp task. It didn’t do much, but it showed you what gulpfile.js is good for and how to export tasks from it, that you can later use from VS Code.

However, I mentioned that there is much more to exporting tasks than it seems on the surface, and I promised to blog more about it. So here we are. Tasks.

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Getting started with gulp and VS Code

Post published:February 3, 2019
Post comments:11 Comments
Reading time:11 mins read

Strange times. I never stop to be amazed with the kinds tools that invaded our pristine development environments. One of those tools is gulp, and if you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry. Why should you hear of it?

A couple of weeks ago I introduced my talk on gulp by explaining how I made it simplify and speed up my development of control add-ins. If you are a real NAV developer, and if you didn’t classify this entire series on gulp into the “who cares” category, then chances are you’d stick with me today and learn how to set up gulp and start using it in VS Code.

In this post, I’ll explain what (and why) you need to do to get gulp up and running, and then I’ll create a very simple gulp task. This is the first post in a series where I hope to build an end-to-end example that you can even put to practical use in your projects.

Let’s get started.

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Codeunit interfaces in AL

Post published:February 2, 2019
Post comments:4 Comments
Reading time:10 mins read

Nearly two and a half years ago I had a dream. It was about codeunit references and codeunit interfaces. And today, nearly two and a half years later I am still here, still having the same dream. We still cannot do codeunit interfaces in AL. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need them. We do. We badly do.

Two things triggered me to write this post about how badly we need codeunit interfaces, or any kind of polymorphism: a NAV TechDays talk, and a github project I saw.

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Automating control add-in development using gulp

Post published:January 17, 2019
Post comments:14 Comments
Reading time:12 mins read

Happy new year everyone! Last year was a bit slow for me, until the very end, when I churned out a year’s worth of posts just in two days. I hope this year to be a bit different, and let me kick-start it with a concept I’ve been playing with recently.

If you are into control add-ins development, chances are you’re familiar with my Visual Studio Project Template for control add-ins. It’s cool because it allows you to deploy all of your changes all the way over to NAV just by pressing F6. But it sucks because it’s based on Visual Studio, which is so… not 2019. It’s true, Microsoft never prescribed exactly which tool you should use to build your control add-ins once you’ve created the interface. It was entirely up to you. For me, Visual Studio used to be the tool of choice because in there you create the interface, and then why not just create everything in there.

But recently, I thought – why not using VS Code to develop control add-ins “v1” (that is: the control add-ins that work in pre-AL, pre-extensions “v2”, pre-NAV2018/BC environments)? If you, like me, still have to do those from time to time, but absolutely want to use VS Code instead of Visual Studio, then this post is for you.

Last month, I’ve decided to port all development work on a major control add-in from Visual Studio into VS Code. When I say “major”, I mean it: it’s 16K lines of JavaScript code in 138 source code files, not including 3^rd party libraries. To automate that in Visual Studio, I used a hodge-podge of build tasks, Windows batch scripts, PowerShell scripts, external utilities for zipping and minification, and the first thing I did – stupid, I know – when I transferred all my work to VS Code was to automate all of my tasks exactly the same way. So, I took all the same batch scripts, configured them as VS Code tasks, and I was happy. Not. It was slow, and ugly.

And then I remembered gulp.

It’s funny, gulp should have been the first thing to cross my mind. But, while I knew it was there, I never did anything with it. But, how complicated can it be? It turned out, I was able to replace all of the automation I had earlier into one nice gulpfile.js and turn my entire development experience completely upside-down. It’s that good.

So, I decided to share a little bit of my learning path, lessons learned, hints, tips, tricks, and all else in a series of blog posts about how to automate control add-in development using gulp. This is the first post in the series of an unknown number of posts to follow up.

Disclaimer: this particular post is not a NAV 2018/BC/AL. This is (mostly) for pre-BC control add-in developers. However, a lot of gulp concepts I’ll talk about are readily applicable to AL and BC world.

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NAV TechDays 2018 Demos: Keyboard Shortcut Listener

Post published:December 12, 2018
Post comments:1 Comment
Reading time:6 mins read

The last of the NAV TechDays 2018 demo series comes with a little story.

While Waldo and I were preparing the “Evolution of the Titan” session, on Sunday before the conference, we were brainstorming the ideas of what would constitute a cool non-visual JavaScript demo. I wanted to showcase the things that JavaScript can do for you in control add-in context, but a less obvious thing. Everyone is expecting to see some cool visual demos, but I wanted to point out the vast possibilities in the non-visual area. Then Waldo asked me: can you make it run an action on a keypress, like post a document on F9?

And that was it! An amazingly cool demo that shows how you can do really cool stuff that falls beyond the visual realm.

Okay, I’ll calm down a bit. Keyboard shortcuts? Seriously? Well, unfortunately, yes. In NAV/BC web client (universal client included) there are almost no keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft is working on some improvements here, but the important thing, allowing developers to bind specific keyboard shortcuts to specific actions, is still conspicuously missing from NAV/BC.

So, I did this demo.

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