Vjeko

Git storage – SHA1

Post published:April 28, 2021
Post comments:4 Comments
Reading time:25 mins read

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.

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What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

Post published:April 16, 2021
Post comments:3 Comments
Reading time:15 mins read

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.

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Webinars in the upcoming period

Post published:March 22, 2021
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Reading time:14 mins read

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.

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Webinar: CI/CD from AL developer’s shoes

Post published:March 5, 2021
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Reading time:4 mins read

~~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.

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Conditional directives

Post published:March 5, 2021
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Reading time:2 mins read

One of the new features of the AL compiler that arrived with 2020 Wave 2 is Precompiler directives. This is nothing spectacular, programming languages had these kinds of things since the dawn of programming languages, and now we have them too.

The biggest thing, though, is that on their surface, just like so many other features (cough! interfaces, cough, cough, interfaces) you can’t really grasp their full power just by reading the documentation available.

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