NAV

TicTacToe challenge winner announcement

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In my last post I announced a challenge: the first pull request on my TicTacToe for AL GitHub repository that contains a properly written event handler with “AI” that either beats the human player or ends in a draw gets a special reward. Honestly, I didn’t expect to see any submissions there, because NAV community is not too GitHub savvy. I rarely get any hands up in the air when in my sessions or workshops I ask who uses GitHub. But, three forks arrived soon and one submission quickly followed. It provides a clean and working solution that properly applies the handler pattern and never loses a game.

And, the winner is: Bartel de Leeuw!

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A couple of AL controladdin demos – Google Maps and Tic Tac Toe

  • Reading time:4 mins read

As a part of preparation for my last event of this year that concludes the conference season 2017 for me, I played around with the latest addition to the AL language stack for VS Code: control add-ins.

If you haven’t already tried it out, or heard about it, then you should get yourself a copy of NAV developer preview, and then visit the Control Add-In Object documentation for AL on MSDN to learn a little bit about how it works. The demo provided over there is, well, basic, to say the least, so I prepared two demos.

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I had a dream: decoupled NAV

  • Reading time:15 mins read

You know about PRS (Partner Ready Software), don’t you? It’s the initiative started by Mark Brummel, Eric Wauters (Waldo), and Gary Winter (not necessarily in this order), and then they decided to expand their team by one more member. I am not quite sure if this was a good move, but the time will tell. It always does.

The main goal of the initiative is to enable you to customize NAV in a repeatable way. Repeatability is kind of a buzzword, but PRS doesn’t just buzz the word. PRS believes repeatability is the key. Today maybe you don’t care about repeatability. In two years, or latest five, you’ll want to go back and rethink your angle. PRS wants you to rethink now.

One way of getting repeatable customizations is through patterns. There are patterns, all over NAV, that repeat, time after time, over and again. Agosto dopo agosto dopo agosto dopo agosto as Jovanotti would put it. Pun intended. When a pattern repeats itself, it’s repetition, not repeatability. There is a big difference between them, big as a house. To get repeatable, is to get rid of repetition. Instead of having essentially the same piece of code all over the place with a hint of Goldberg Variations, how about having it only once, in a single place?

Like, having one place where you assign a number from a number series to any master record, document, journal, you name it. Instead of at least—let me guess—120 different places in about as many objects. Then, if you want to customize one small aspect of it, you just touch that one single place. You can then repeat the same customization for hundreds of customers, not only surviving the version upgrade, but making it (the upgrade) an essential, non-disruptive, piece-of-cakeish part of your service offering. That’s the repeatability that PRS is all about.

But—there is always a but—the way NAV is today, we are a long way from this kind of repeatability. A long and painful way away.

That’s why I had a dream. I know it’s only a dream because to make NAV do what I am about to share here would be to downright rearchitect it from the core. But I’ll share it nonetheless. Keep reading.

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Beta Available!

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BetaI don’t know about you, but I think today is a great day: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Beta has been published on PartnerSource, and if you have access, you can download it from here.

I’ve been playing around with CTPs for more quite a while, and even though I can’t share any specifics, I can assure you: this is definitely the best release ever, technically, architecturally, functionally and from business value perspective. Whatever angle you take – this release is massive.

I believe I don’t exaggerate if I say that 2013 brings more news in comparison with 2009 R2, than 2009 brought in comparison with 5.0 SP1.

If you want to check more about what exactly is new, I suggest you read the white paper and accompanying documentation at the NAV 2013 launch portal, and I hope the MVPs soon get the clearance to blog about specific features. There are just so many fantastically exciting to-dos for this blog, about NAV 2013, that I’ll probably eat my fingernails – heck, the whole fingers! – in anticipation to be able to start.

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NAV TechDays 2011 in Antwerp, Belgium

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imageIf you are a follower of Mibuso.com you may already know that they are organizing NAV TechDays in Antwerp, Belgium, on September 29 and 30, a conference dedicated to all NAV developers, solution architects and technical folks in general. The content will be strictly technical, and speaker list includes a lot of Who’s Who of NAV folks including Michael Nielsen and Freddy Kristiansen, and MVPs including Eric Wauters, Jörg Stryk, and me.

It will be two days full of exciting technical sessions, mostly discussing the upcoming NAV 7 release, Cloud computing, integration and extensibility of NAV through .NET and web services, and development in general.

I hoped to deliver a session about .NET interoperability, but Microsoft folks seem to have reserved it for themselves, so I’ll deliver a still nice session about testability features and how to use them to customize NAV bug-free.

If by now you are not in the “where do I click to register” mood, then let me know that if you register by June 30, you may win one of the two iPad 2 devices that nice folks at Mibuso.com are giving away to two lucky participants.

Ah, ok, now we are talking business Smile Here’s the link: http://www.navtechdays.com/2011/registration.asp

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Definitely not normal

  • Reading time:5 mins read

It all started with Waldo and his Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 is not a “normal” release … beware! post two weeks ago. Waldo did not complain (much Smile), he explained what R2 is and what it isn’t, and it turns out that it isn’t many of the things people hoped it was.

Then Luc followed with his Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 is … post, in which he again says NAV 2009 R2 is not normal.

I’m sorry to say, but I am definitely joining this “not normal” party, ‘cause there is something strange going on with NAV, and I believe there will soon be either a SP(how does NAV 2009 R2 SP1 sounds?), or a series of hotfixes.

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Connecting to NAV through Web services recorded session

  • Reading time:1 min read

recordingToday I’ve delivered the brown bag session Connecting to NAV through Web services as a part of Microsoft’s “Dynamics Brown Bag Sessions” initiative for Central and Eastern Europe. The session was attended by a great number of partners from the region, and I say a big THANK YOU to everyone attending. I hope it was worth your time.

For any of you who did not have a chance to attend it live, or were not invited to it for whatever reason, you can watch the recorded session, download the presentation, and download the demo Visual Studio projects showing NAV Web services basics.

I would also like to thank to Almut Tadsen, Microsoft Dynamics Evangelist at Microsoft and the organizer of the Brown Bag Session series for giving me this opportunity. I’m looking forward to participating in this initiative again.

If you were there today, I would appreciate if you could take a minute and leave a comment here, letting me (and everyone else) if this was a time well invested for you. Thanks!

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 ships

  • Reading time:6 mins read

imageI’m growing increasingly impatient as the progress bar on my File Transfer Manager is approaching 100%. Behind the cryptical download title—Dynamics.NAV60R2.HR.1097366.DVD.zip—hides the much awaited Microsoft Dynamics 2009 R2 HR (Croatian) release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Yes, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 has officially shipped, and you can download your copy at Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 download page. You can also access the NAV 2009 R2 Launch Portal.

This is the first time ever, that any NAV product has shipped simultaneously in 43 countries in the world. For many countries, mine included, this is also the first release of NAV 2009.

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Brown bag session: Connecting to NAV through Web services

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Microsoft’s DPE team in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has started organizing a so called brown bag sessions for NAV developers, as a part of developing a Microsoft Dynamics Community in the region. As a part of this initiative, I will deliver a brown bag session tomorrow at 9:30 AM (CET) titled “Connecting to NAV through Web services”.

Sessions are delivered through Live Meeting and are by-invitation only, so if you want to participate you must be an employee of a Microsoft partner company in CEE region. If you haven’t got an invitation, and you are entitled to participate, please contact your local Dynamics lead at Microsoft (or Partner Account Manager) and ask them to send you the link.

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Strange Web services behavior in NAV

  • Reading time:4 mins read

bugorfeatureA bug or a feature? Sometimes it’s hard to tell for sure.

Web services are a fantastic tool in NAV, however, they do not always behave exactly as you would expect them to. There is one particularly annoying behavior, which just after you get used to it starts getting even stranger.

So, setting any numeric value during the Create method call on any page web service will have no effect, and the only way to set a value in a numeric field would be through a subsequent call to Update method.

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