Long time no see, eh? 😳 I won’t offer no excuses, but I have been plenty busy with things that you’ll benefit in some way or another, far more than you’d benefit from me writing here. So, let’s jump straight into it.

First things first. I just can’t express my gratitude to all of you who use it every day. Just a few numbers for you to feel the scale of it. At the moment of writing this post, there have been:

• 17.382 installs
• 5.369 repositories managed by Ninja
• More than 3.500 users actively use Ninja every day
• More than 4.700 users actively use Ninja every week
• More than 3.300 repositories being worked in every day.

This is huge. Thank you all for finding Ninja an obviously indispensable tool to manage your object ID assignments.

Now back to the point of this post. This week there have been a couple of releases, and one of the most important new features is logical ranges. That’s the feature that allows you to assign object IDs from ranges that do not necessarily match those in your app.json file. There are several use cases for this, and the feature is quite flexible.

Today, I did another live session where I presented this feature. If you want to learn about how it works and what good it is for, check it out:

That’s it. Thanks for using Ninja, and I am looking forward to hearing your feedback.

What’s the next feature you’d like Ninja to include?

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.