The Beauty and The Beast: NAV and .NET

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imageIf 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.

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Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 ships

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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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Death of Classic (C/SIDE) Client

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tomb_guardYesterday, during a coffee break at the What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Technical for Application Consultants training in Vilnius, Lithuania (a fabulous place, by the way), a discussion arose around the destiny of the Classic (or C/SIDE) client in NAV. Some participants stated that “it’s never going to go away” because “Microsoft would not dare shutting it down”.

Unfortunately, it is going away, and quickly. Maybe it wasn’t too obvious at first, because Microsoft never actually said explicitly that “Classic client is going to be discontinued”, but if you read the latest Statement of Direction for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, it’s there.

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Read My Lips: Why?

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Recently, a reader, commenting on my last post about Sure Step, pointed me to an article by Karl E. Wiegers
“Read My Lips: No New Models!” I initially responded to the comment, but I figure the comments aren’t read as often as posts, so I decided to blog it.

It’s doubly funny that the reader is using Dr. Wiegers to devalue and dismiss Sure Step: firstly, the article has really nothing to do with implementation methodologies at all, and secondly, when I delivered Sure Step training at WinDays pre-conf earlier this year, I gave to each attendant a copy of Karl E. Wiegers’s latest book “Practical Project Initiation”—at the time it was the best book available that matched both the message of my training and the point of Sure Step as a methodology.

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