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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Natural selection: death of dataports

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image It’s the survival of the fittest game, that stuff that happened to the dataports. You know dataports? That class of NAV objects that’s used to move data back and forth in text format?

It’s really funny what has been going on with them lately. They evolved, then degenerated. Today, they are an endangered species. A release or two, and they might be gone for good. Just like dinosaurs.

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Techno stuff

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  • Reading time:10 mins read

Tons of documents exist about Microsoft Dynamics NAV, but most of them start with marketing lingo, and don’t wander away too much from it altogether. While it is nice to know that it is a system which will give you freedom to focus on your business, it is also nice to know what is it made of, and how it works inside. Inspired by a total lack of resources which would give a clear picture of all the system components and their relationships, I wrote this post in hope someone might find it helpful.

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