October 2014

One more great Directions EMEA event is over, and it was a great experience again. I am a bit sorry, though, that my main focus was delivering presentations, so I enjoyed myself less mingling around, meeting new folks and consuming content. But it was still a great event.

Even though my blog queue has a lot of far more interesting todo entries waiting for their prime time, on my short flight to the Directions EMEA conference in Poznań, instead of dozing away or blank-staring through the window, I’ve decided to introduce the…

Once upon a time, a smart bloke named Saikichi Toyoda came up with a 5 Whys troubleshooting technique. It postulates that you only need to ask “why” five times to get to the root cause of any problem in a cause-and-effect sequence.

Most of What’s New information about NAV 2015 will mostly talk about the Word report layouts, as well as the C/AL support for these. However, most of the What’s New documentation doesn’t have a single word about what I find among the most exciting new reporting features in C/AL: the capability to programmatically control the request pages.

Use Labels (View > Labels) instead of data columns for captions in your reports. It’s amazing how much you save in terms of data transfer. And your Data Set looks better too. Microsoft, why don’t you use this consistently on your standard reports?

Upgrade projects are lots of fun. They are full of challenges that keep you busy day and night all the time. I have encountered a very interesting challenge on my last upgrade project. The object upgrade process was completed, the data upgrade procedure ready to go, but when we started first tests we realized that the data upgrade execution takes some 39 hours to complete just Step 1.