What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

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  • Reading time:15 mins read

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Release Wave 1 is out (whoa, that was a mouthful) with some new perks for developers. Today, I had another live session at http://vjeko.live, and I made it both the first one in the series of What’s New for the latest release, as well as the episode four of Fun with Interfaces.

Interfaces are such an amazing feature in AL language, that was long missed, and that’s now saving my day nearly every time I do something with AL. The latest AL compiler (runtime “7.0”) comes with these new interesting features about interfaces:

  • You can mark interfaces for obsoletion.
  • You can mark individual interface functions for obsoletion.
  • You can return interfaces as return type from functions.
  • You can define UnknownValueImplementation for enums to specify the interface that represents any unknown enum values.

Let’s take a look at each one of those with examples.

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TryFunction Lessons Learned from Preview Posting

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One of great new functional features of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is preview posting. It allows you to preview all the entries that would result from posting a document or a general journal.

Preview posting is not a simple thing. If it was, Microsoft would have delivered it years ago. There must be something in particular with NAV 2016 that powers preview posting, so I decided to investigate it and see exactly how it works.

I am not particularly happy with what I found out, but I have also learned some valuable lessons from it. In this post, I’ll share my findings.

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What’s New in NAV 2016: Control Add-ins

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Well, control add-ins are not new in NAV 2016, they have been around for a long time now. But, they have been improved and this blog post is about these improvements.

Of course, the improvements are exclusively in the Web client framework, not the Windows client, and I am educated-guessing here that we won’t really see many improvements in the control add-in framework for Windows in the future. Why would we? All control add-ins should target all clients and use the Web framework, anyway so the case for Windows client is getting weaker and weaker.

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What’s New in NAV 2016: Splitting Atoms with TryFunction

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If this was a joke, then it would be one of those good-news-bad-news jokes. So which one do you want first? To stay true to all jokes of this kind, I’ll start with good news first.

Good news is, you now have TryFunctions, that return true if no error happens, and false if an error happens inside them.

And the bad news? You’ll never want to use them.

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What’s New in NAV 2016: Code Editor

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  • Reading time:6 mins read

Three years ago I was doing a presentation about something or other about NAV at a non-NAV conference. That’s in front of normal developers. And you can imagine what their impression was of the state of the technology when, in front of a couple of hundred mostly C# developer, I opened the C/AL editor.

I don’t need to be concerned about that anymore, because Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 comes with a new code editor, which comes with a number of features the whole NAV community way hoping for since I remember. And I started forgetting a long time ago.

Namely, we now have:

  • Proper syntax highlighting
  • Line numbers
  • Change indicators
  • Auto-complete intellisense style. Ish.
  • Syntax tooltips
  • And – hold your seats! – undo!

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