Tips & Tricks

Abusing Images property to load HTML in control add-ins

  • Reading time:4 mins read

One of major limitations of control add-ins is not being able to define HTML. It seems so unbelievably unbelievable, that anyone looking at it from the outside of the NAV/BC playground may say “obviously, you must be missing something!”. But I am not. The one thing that you would expect to find first when defining a control add-in (and control add-ins in NAV/BC are nothing more than pieces of HTML that live within the allocated area of your browser real estate) is to be able to define the HTML. And yet, you can’t define it. The only way to show any UI from your control add-in is to procedurally create any of your control add-in HTML.

This makes no sense. No. Sense.

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Read more about the article Module Binder Pattern proposal
Zlata Praha, by Roman Boed

Module Binder Pattern proposal

  • Reading time:17 mins read

Whoa! This has been quite an event, the Directions EMEA 2016 in Prague. There has never been this many people (1.700+) and it was quite a pleasure connecting again with old friends, and meeting new friends. Also, it has been quite a pleasure listening to many good sessions, and an even bigger pleasure delivering four of them.

And this is why I am blogging now – to follow up on my promise during my Polymorphic Event Patterns for C/AL. I promised you that I’d post my pattern proposal online, and here I am doing it.

Let’s get started.

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Dynamic certificate validation when calling Web services

  • Reading time:1 min read

There are situations when you’ll want to call Web services from C/AL, and those Web services might be protected by certificate that your local machine cannot validate directly. Web service might be secured with a self-signed certificate, or by a certificate obtained from an authority that is not globally trusted.

In all those situations, you might need to have a facility to validate certificates yourself. That’s something that’s at the fingertips of all C# developers through the ServerCertificateValidationCallback delegate. However, in C/AL, delegates are unfortunately not (yet) supported.

A friend of mine had this specific problem today, so I remembered that a short while ago I made a “how do I” video on this specific topic. Thanks, Mathias, for giving me a prod, and reminding me of a quick blog topic.

Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/NW_ZiW6J790

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Dynamically loading assemblies at runtime

  • Reading time:6 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

  • Reading time:3 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:

image

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

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Deploying from Visual Studio, update

  • Reading time:3 mins read

A few days ago I have published my PowerShell script that streamlines and automates deployment of control add-ins from Visual Studio. Over the past couple of days I have improved it a little bit, and fixed a few bugs, so here’s an updated version that is more resilient to your project structure, produces resource zips that NST not only extracts, but actually understands, and does a little more.

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NAV TechDays 2015 wrap up

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Another NAV TechDays is over, and this one was the best so far. 950 people from all over the world all passionate about NAV and technology and eager to learn and share and discuss the latest in NAV. It was amazing, Luc did a great job again, and I am looking forward to the next year, hoping this conference makes it beyond 1000 attendees.

This year I have delivered a yet another “Black Belt” session named “Client Add-ins Black Belt: bringing .NET and JavaScript together” and as promised, I deliver the session material here on my blog.

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Deploying control add-ins during development in NAV 2016

  • Reading time:13 mins read

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 brings many new features, one of which is a set of PowerShell cmdlets to manage add-ins. These are:

While these cmdlets are certainly useful for installation and deployment, I find them even more useful during development. When I blogged about deploying resource files automatically during development some months ago, I showed how you could use PowerShell during build process in Visual Studio to invoke a codeunit that registers control add-ins. Now, in NAV 2016, these tasks are a lot simpler with these new cmdlets.

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Sorting out the DLL hell, Part 3: The Code

  • Reading time:11 mins read

[Update, February 8, 2016: there is a new version of code from this post. Please check https://vjeko.com/dynamically-loading-assemblies-at-runtime]

Okay here we go. In this post I deliver the promised code that handles automatic deployment of all your assemblies to client and server, as needed.

For any of you who haven’t read the last two posts, I am talking about automatically deploying .NET assemblies to clients and server, from the database, on demand, at runtime.

This will be heavy on code, so fasten your seatbelt and brace for impact.

Continue ReadingSorting out the DLL hell, Part 3: The Code

Sorting out the DLL hell, Part 2: The Solution

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Deploying .NET assemblies to clients and servers in need is no simple affair. In my last post I have explained the problem, and announced the solution.

As promised, in this post I bring you the solution.

To be fully honest, this post only brings the conceptual solution, just a little brain game for you to train your .NET brain muscles a bit. The actual code I’ll deliver in the next post.

Continue ReadingSorting out the DLL hell, Part 2: The Solution