November 2020

Today I’ve streamed the Fun with Interfaces video blog at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMHL32c5mg and the recording is now published online. This was the first session I ever delivered about interfaces, and I actually planned delivering this a lot earlier (I made a suggestion to run this at Directions ASIA before corona crisis hit), but never had a chance.

Source code files are living things. We add new ones and change their content on daily basis. Occasionally we delete them, too. Git is amazingly efficient when it comes to tracking these kinds of changes. However, sometimes we need to change the file name, or file path, or both.

A lot of us still have a ton of C/AL code sitting around in existing databases that sooner or later will have to be moved into AL. A lot of us also have a ton of AL code using DotNet that we want to be able to run in Microsoft’s cloud (that is: not on-prem).

Thanks to everyone who watched my live stream today! The audience wasn’t big, but it’s a very narrow topic, not of broad interest. Still, I am glad I got a few interesting questions that actually introduced my future topics quite nicely. You can find the recording here: As promised, I have published the GetImageResource.js file on my GitHub.

Thanks to everyone who attended my live blog yesterday, and to everyone who subscribed. It was so encouraging to see that you like this idea. As announced yesterday, my live blog will run on a fixed schedule – every Friday, at 14:00 CET (8:00 AM EST) I’ll get online to present a topic and discuss it live with you.

It’s time to turn a new page. You’ve noticed that I’ve been absent for a long time. No posts, no activity. Well, blogging takes time, and I am a sort of a perfectionist. Writing posts sometimes takes hours, there have been posts that took me days. Let me not mention how many articles sit unfinished.

The community often criticizes Microsoft for adding new platform features only when Microsoft needed them. Well, it has been a bit too harsh – Microsoft did add improvements in other situations, too. But still, if you compare it to other Microsoft’s languages like TypeScript or C#, the AL language isn’t really advancing.

I’ve never truly understood why we could explicitly commit a transaction, but we could only implicitly roll one back. There is a universe of difference between throwing an error (and ending the call stack), and rolling back (and continuing execution). There was always a way to roll back and go on, sure.