What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas
Although I really planned, and I really wanted to, I don't think I am going to post anything useful in next few days. I spent last week in Seattle, attending…
Code of coding 2: Documenting changes
Few days ago, when I wrote about coding, I didn’t have a slightest idea that at the same time, at the completely opposite part of the globe, Dave was blogging almost about the same thing. It is interesting to know that I am not the only one out there actually worying about code, and how it looks like.
The most common thing I used to hear when I asked bad coders about their code was: “It works, why shoud I care.”
Manufacturing quickie
Today, I got an e-mail from a reader of this blog, who asked me to help them with an actual problem on a project. Their customer is a small manufacturing customer in textile vertical. Whenever they calculate consumption, quantities for certain items get rounded to full numbers. Since the items are usually textile, measured in meters, a consumption of 1.27 meters can end up registered as 2 meters instead. Not that it’s something which can’t be overridden manually, but it is pain in the butt, and hey, why do we have computers in the first place if we have to do their job.
Code of coding
Code is boring. It is geeky. And it’s ugly, too. In C/AL it is especially ugly. While contemporary development tools come with all sort of gizmos which make coding easier, such as color-coding, auto-completion, refactoring, etc., C/AL editor seems like having awaken from a thousand-year sleep. Take a look at the color coding: there is none. Or there is, but palette is limited to that of Charlie Chaplin’s. There is some functionality which looks like auto-completion but it is not, and the text editing capabilities make you dream about Notepad at night. But you can look at it from a different angle. C/AL editor is the way it is for a reason: to keep programmers away. It’s the defence mechanism developed over twenty or so years of evolution of the system, to protect the system from rookie knowitall programmers ripping away that stupid Gen. Jnl.-Post Line codeunit and rewrite it the way it should be. With this, we come to Rule No. 1: Know what you are doing.
Why doesn’t my filter work?
Today I got a comment from another soul out there, spending their time blogging about Microsoft Dynamics NAV. I’ve immediately put the link to my blogroll, and it really deserves it, because it is the best blog on the topic I’ve seen so far.
Few days back, on that blog, there was a post about setting filters, which didn’t work as expected, and you had to write a wordy workaround for a thing that should work as expected, but surprisingly it doesn’t.