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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).

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).