2014

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.

When testing the upgrade process, it’s a good idea to make a backup after every significant step, such as after importing Step 1 upgrade objects, after completing Step 1, after converting the database, and so on. This way you can always resume from the last meaningful point and save a lot of time, as compared to always running the whole process from the beginning.

Do you know cues? Those clickable colorless stacks of documents in NAV 2009, that turned into clickable blue stack tiles in NAV 2013 R2, and that worked on top of FlowFields of type Integer? Well, in NAV 2015, this munch bunch has turned into clickable blue tiles with pictures and colorful…

In case you missed it, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 is now available for download at PartnerSource. Follow this link to download your copy today: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/northamerica/support/support-news/msdnav2015download The download page contains the W1 version along with 20 country versions.

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.

To open the page object for a page part control in a page you are designing, simply select that page part control and press Ctrl+F12 (or View > Go To Definition).

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.

Thanks to everybody who attended my session at Directions US in San Diego today. It was a pleasure to deliver it, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It surely would have been much better if I were not running some kind of a flu, but I won’t complain.