2015

For me, Mannheim was always a yet another German city, one that beyond its name I knew nothing else about. When it was announced that Directions EMEA 2015 would be in Mannheim, my first reaction was “say what?” And yet, just as last year in Poznan, I was pleasantly surprised, and realized that every place has something to show, spirit to share, and energy to bring.

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.

If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand, that’s an unwritten rule-that-rules-them-all of programming. You absolutely love to apply syntactical stunts to impress your coworkers, especially if you do C# and they don’t, don’t you?

Not that I am saying it’s a good thing, but trial and error is a fairly common approach to debugging in the NAV world. We’ve all done it. Heck, even with the comprehensive testability framework built in, we all still do it more often than we’re happy to admit while sober.

Make sure that you don’t access the Microsoft.Dynamics.NAV JavaScript object before the document ready event fires. If you do so, you might experience problems on Chrome when the user refreshes the browser (F5).

In most of my JavaScript client extensibility demos, I develop the whole content of my resource ZIP files inside Visual Studio. When I press F6, magically my NAV gets updated with the latest version of JavaScript that I just wrote. So, how do I do that? Here’s the cookbook.

On Monday, June 15th I have delivered another session in Microsoft’s Road to Repeatability series of online demos about technical NAV features, this time covering Client Extensibility. The session went through both the .NET and JavaScript aspects of client extensibility, and again – I promised to post all of the demos and content from the session on my blog.

Yesterday, as a part of Microsoft’s Road To Repeatability program, I delivered a live meeting session about server extensibility in NAV in which I focused on certain areas of .NET Interoperability and Web Services that in my opinion align well with the R2R message.

Some NAV PowerShell cmdlets (such as Import-NAVApplicationObject ) don’t have the -Force switch, and always ask for confirmation regardless of whether you include the -Confirm switch or not. To work around this, append the – Confirm:$false switch to such command.

Yesterday I posted a quick tip, which quickly got some comments about it being wrong. Since I know people who commented were unlikely to say something incorrect, I went to check on, because I myself experienced difficulties that made me write that post.