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Read more about the article What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

  • Reading time:8 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.

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

  • Reading time:10 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.

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

  • Reading time:3 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.

Continue ReadingWebinar: CI/CD from AL developer’s shoes
Read more about the article Conditional directives

Conditional directives

  • 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.

Continue ReadingConditional directives
Read more about the article Resident control add-ins – no SingleInstance

Resident control add-ins – no SingleInstance

  • Reading time:10 mins read

My last topic was resident control add-ins. In my video and written blog I’ve explained what they are and how you can quickly have them up and running. However, there was one particular thing I said I generally don’t like – single-instance codeunits. So my second blog on this topic focuses precisely on that: how to make your control add-in available to your AL code from everywhere, without having to rely on a single-instance codeunit.

Continue ReadingResident control add-ins – no SingleInstance
Read more about the article Webinar: Git branching models and strategies

Webinar: Git branching models and strategies

  • Reading time:2 mins read

A few days ago I’ve announced that there will be a new series of webinars. The last webinar was a success. Apart from a few people complaining that I talked fast, and that there was too much content, I got pretty good comments. People felt quite happy with the content and that the value they received was worth the money they invested.

One thing I’ve learned was that you want to learn more about various branching models and strategies. One thing is talking about Git from the technical angle – that’s what the last webinar was about; this time I am focusing on the strategy, how to make Git work inside your organization and how to organize your repository and workflow.

Continue ReadingWebinar: Git branching models and strategies
Read more about the article Resident control add-ins

Resident control add-ins

  • Reading time:7 mins read

One of the most common questions I get asked about Control Add-ins is whether you can make a control add-in be always present and able to respond to your calls from AL. In other words: can you have a resident control add-in that you can invoke from anywhere in your AL code.

I’ve done a lot about control add-ins. However, I’ve never done resident control add-ins for real; all I know about them is pure theory and then some playing I did at various points of time. Still, this is an interesting topic that I wanted to address some way or other.

So, yesterday I did a live session about it.

Continue ReadingResident control add-ins

A couple of ideas for HttpClient

  • Reading time:11 mins read

When invoking any REST web services, a lot of AL code mostly looks like this:

procedure CallRESTFoo()
var
    Client: HttpClient;
    Response: HttpResponseMessage;
    Body: Text;
    Json: JsonObject;
begin
    Client.Get('https://foo.bar/', Response);
    Response.Content.ReadAs(Body);
    Json.ReadFrom(Body);
    // Process JSON body of the response...
end;

Of course, there are more things there, like headers or perhaps calling HTTP POST (or another method) instead of GET, but when you strip it down to the bones, the chunk above is what remains.

Today’s post is a follow up for my HttpClient Patterns live session on http://vjeko.live/ and as I promised, I am providing the text-only version for those who prefer reading to watching.

Continue ReadingA couple of ideas for HttpClient

Schedule for the period ahead

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Happy New Year everyone, with a little delay. I was busy in the first two weeks of this year preparing and delivering the “Leveraging Git” webinar. It turned out to be quite a success, but it also prevented me from doing my live session last Friday.

But this short break doesn’t mean I am not going to get busy with my blog and live blog again. This is what’s coming up.

Continue ReadingSchedule for the period ahead