What’s New

Read more about the article What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

What’s new about interfaces in 2021 Wave 1

  • Reading time:8 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

  • Reading time:8 mins read

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

  • Reading time:4 mins read

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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Read more about the article What’s New in NAV 2016: Splitting Atoms with TryFunction

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

  • Reading time:11 mins read

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

  • Reading time:4 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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Upgrade Codeunits in NAV 2015

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Once upon a time, and really not such a long time ago, there was no such thing as a codenit type. In all honesty, there is still no such thing as a codeunit type – there is subtype, though. (Why we have subtypes, without having types, beats me, but let’s let the semantics go.)

Nowadays, we have four codeunit types. NAV 2009 SP1 brought along the Test and Test Runner types, which – in my experience, at least – haven’t seen much runtime (which is a pity, if you ask me). And now NAV 2015 brings along another type: the Upgrade codeunit type. The mere sound of it makes my heart thrill. The Upgrade codeunit. Mmm.

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Synchronizing Database Schema in NAV 2015

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Before NAV 2013 R2 the “database schema synchronization” was an unknown term. Either you could do a database schema change, or you couldn’t. There was no such thing as data loss.  If you wanted to change a field type or delete a field (or delete the whole table for that matter), and there was data in that field in the table, you got an error. Data present – no go.

However, with multi-tenancy, and the possibility to mount tenant databases originating from different applications, suddenly there was an issue – how should NAV handle possible differences in database schema for different tenants? Should we force the change at the cost of data loss? And thus the term “database schema synchronization” entered the vocabulary of regular NAV Joes.

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Unlimited Text Length in NAV 2013

  • Reading time:1 min read

imageHave you noticed already that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the text variables can have unlimited length? That’s quite a leap ahead of the previous versions which couldn’t handle more than 1024 characters per variable. If you wanted to achieve bug-free code then, when you were assigning texts around, you had to concatenate the result down to the MAXSTRLEN of the target text.

Not anymore.

The trick is to simply not declare the Length property on text variables. If you declare a variable of type Text, and then leave the Length empty, it means – unlimited.

Don’t worry – you won’t kill NAV by eating up all the available memory. Underneath C/AL there is .NET now, and strings in .NET are of unlimited length, or better yet – unlimittable – length anyway. Strings will only make things slow if you stuff the revised version of King James’s Bible in them. In all practical situations, there will be absolutely no performance penalty of leaving Texts unlimited.

I don’t know about you, but from tomorrow morning, I won’t be setting Length to my Texts.

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