2015

Deploying .NET assemblies to clients and servers in need is no simple affair. In my last post I have explained the problem, and announced the solution. As promised, in this post I bring you the solution. To be fully honest, this post only brings the conceptual solution, just a little brain game for you to train your .NET brain muscles a bit.

Let me tell you right away if you need to read this post at all. If you never wrote a single .NET class library intended to be used as a .NET interoperability assembly from C/AL, or if you never ever deployed a .dll file into the Add-ins folder of either Service or RoleTailored Client, then you probably don’t want to read this post.

In my two last posts, I laid out the technical design of the Preview Posting feature, and then showed how to simplify its design to get around the unwanted behavior of TryFunction . One thing is obvious from these posts: Preview Posting wants to simulate posting of a document (or journal) to show what the results would be, but without leaving any actual trace in the database.

In my yesterday’s article about the Preview Posting feature in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 I said there are at least two ways to redesign it to avoid both the unnecessary complication and inherent dangers of the TryFunction feature behavior.

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.

We all use records. And we all used to whine about records not supporting all the features we need. And they still don’t, but in Microsoft Dynamics NAV they support much more. Some of the new features are well documented, some are somewhat documented. So here’s what I figured out so far is new about the Record data type.

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…

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 TryFunction s, that return true if no error happens, and false if an error happens inside them.

The best news sometimes go silent, and the newest release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV has just proven this claim. Ladies and gentlemen, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 comes shipped with full set of application test toolkit, that you can use to test your customizations against regression issues.

When comparing .NET variables, including Enums, you cannot use C/AL comparison operators. To compare .NET variables, you must use the Equals method (of the System.Object type) that all .NET types implement or inherit. So, instead of IF var1 = var2, or IF var1 = var1.EnumValue (in case of an Enum), just write IF var1.Equals(var2), or IF var1.Equals(var1.EnumValue).