C# – Page 2 – Vjeko.com

From C/AL to executable: how NAV runs your C/AL code

Post published:October 6, 2016
Post comments:22 Comments
Reading time:12 mins read

A lot of folks write C/AL and never worry about what happens then. C/AL is written, NAV execute is, the story ends. The same way the story ends when you flush a toilet and the tank refills. How exactly? Who cares.

While understanding the inner workings of a toilet flush tank doesn’t necessarily make you more efficient at whatever it was that made you press the flush button in the first place, having a better understanding of exactly how NAV uses your C/AL code throughout its lifecycle is of arguably higher practical value.

Have you ever wondered what exactly happens to your C/AL code when you write it? How exactly does NAV run that stuff? Does it do any run-time interpretation, or does it compile C/AL into native code that runs on a processor? What does just-in-time compilation mean and does it happen with C/AL? If so, when and why?

If any of these questions bother you, read on. If they don’t bother you, read on because they should bother you. If they don’t bother you because you know the answers, read on still, and then brag by poking holes in my explanation.

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Gentlemen’s agreement pattern, or handling the “Handled” pattern

Post published:October 4, 2016
Post comments:9 Comments
Reading time:13 mins read

I’ve delved deep into design patterns story with my last two blog posts, but I am far from over. The patterns I discussed are the ones we could use up until NAV 2015 (we can still use them, of course!) but some more robust loose coupling (excuse the near-oxymoron) can be achieved with what NAV 2016 brought along: events.

It’s the “Handled” pattern. This pattern comes from Thomas Hejlsberg, a chief architect and CTO of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and was first described by Mark Brummel on his blog. It’s a powerful loose-coupling pattern that successfully addresses the shortcomings of all design patterns I discussed earlier. I would prefer calling this pattern Event Façade rather than “Handled”, but it’s not my baby to christen.

Let’s take a look.

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Dynamically loading assemblies at runtime

Post published:February 8, 2016
Post comments:7 Comments
Reading time:7 mins read

When you spend more time in C# than C/AL, and you still tell yourself and the world around you that you are developing for NAV, then this post is for you.

I already wrote a three-article series about “DLL hell” and how to resolve it, and in my last post in the series (https://vjeko.com/sorting-out-the-dll-hell-part-3-the-code) I delivered some code that help you take control of your .NET assemblies.

This time, I am delivering an updated solution, one that solves all the problems others, and myself, have encountered in the meantime.

So, fasten the seatbelt, and let’s embark on another .NET interoperability black belt ride.

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Getting out of the DateTime mess, or how to get Utc DateTime in C/AL

Post published:November 24, 2015
Post comments:13 Comments
Reading time:5 mins read

Today at work I was trying to untangle one big bowl of spaghetti called DateTime. It’s the C/AL DateTime I am talking about, not System.DateTime from .NET.

The problem with C/AL DateTime is that no matter what you do it’s, according to documentation, “always displayed as local time”.

Another problem with C/AL DateTime is that C/AL is a bit rude when it comes to System.DateTime: whenever C/AL compiler (or runtime) encounters a value of System.DateTime it’s automatically converted to C/AL DateTime.

When you combine those two problems, you get the following problem: even though System.DateTime is perfectly capable of handling time in both UTC or local kind, C/AL isn’t.

To prove this point, just run this:

MESSAGE(‘Current local time: %1\Current UTC time: %2’,SystemDateTime.Now,SystemDateTime.UtcNow);

It will show this:

And I am currently sitting in a UTC+1 time zone, mind you.

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Visual Studio Control Add-in Project Template

Post published:November 23, 2015
Post comments:23 Comments
Reading time:3 mins read

If part of your daily job includes creating control add-ins for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, then you know that creating control add-ins that target all clients requires quite a lot manual work. There are a lot of small steps that you must do every time.

To avoid all that work that adds no value, only frustration, here’s a Visual Studio project template that you can use to automate the process of creating a new control add-in.

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