Another NAV TechDays is over, and again, needless to say, it was a splendid conference. Thanks to everybody who attended one of my sessions about .NET Interoperability: the pre-conference workshop for beginners, the session for beginners, and the advanced, or as I like to call it, the “Black Belt” session.
As I promised, I’m making all materials available for download here on my blog, and Luc will also make the recordings available from Mibuso.
If there wasn’t one already, someone should have invented Belgium. There are two things in this world that I love, and probably shouldn’t (and an oversized red speaker’s shirt I got from Luc today did a darned god job at concealing the unlucky consequences of overly indulging in both of them): beer and chocolate. Boy, do Belgians know their beer and chocolate!But they know their NAV, too, and after NAV TechDays 2011, which have just ended in Antwerp, and two days of top NAV content, I can only say – great job, Luc and the team, and please make it a tradition.
If you attended my presentation about .NET interoperability, then there are a couple of demos I couldn’t deliver due to time constraints, and I promised to blog it. So, here we go.
It’s about streams. You already know that in NAV there are two data types, InStream and OutStream, that allow you to stream data in and out of generic sources or destinations. They are a fantastic tool, because they require you to know nothing about the type of source or destination, and you can store and retrieve data without having to care if the data comes from Internet, or a BLOB field, or is it written to a file, or transported over an XMLport. Stream makes it abstract and allows you to simply handle the data, and make the object itself care about the specifics.
If you try exposing Page 5 Currencies as a Web service in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, and then consuming this web service through a .NET application, you are almost guaranteed to encounter some unhelpful and generic XML errors that give you absolutely no clue about what exactly, where and why, went wrong.
Here’s an example of the error:
There is an error in XML document (1, 3634).
The error took me a while to debug and pinpoint the source, but in the end I managed to find a neat solution which I find worth sharing here, just in case somebody out there is scratching their had over it.
A year ago I used to run a monthly roundup of NAV blogs and give you a short gist of who said what. Then I got lazy and stopped blogging on the weekly basis, and boy what a mistake I did – because some nice new blogs appeared in the meantime. I am somewhat ashamed that I learned about this blog only recently, but there is a gem out there you shouldn’t miss: Van Vugt’s dynamiXs.
Often you don’t even notice how quickly time goes by, except for a few milestones, which happen once a year and remind you that another one’s over.
WinDays conference is one of such milestones, and I’ve barely published a handful of posts here since the last time it was the most discussed topic in Croatian IT community. So, an incredibly short year later, here’s another one: WinDays9.