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When I was writing my last post I had a distinct feeling that I was trampling over some boundaries of good NAV design. After all, you should not do stuff like that, NAV isn’t meant to do things like that, or at least that was how I felt. And then two things happened. First, I asked myself: what the heck, why not?

There are situations when you want to exchange data between different objects in NAV, and there is no simple way to do it. One of those, that a friend stumbled upon a couple of days ago goes like this: you have a page which shows a subpage, that is linked to a factbox.

Handling Excel files in NAV 2013 (including R2) is not as easy as it seems at first. The Excel Buffer table – an obvious choice of the old days – supports only Open XML format (*.xlsx), and Excel Interoperability implementation seems a bit buggy (check the comments in my old post about .NET interoperability: https://vjeko.com/blog/the-beauty-and-the-beast-nav-and-net ).

Another NAV TechDays is over, and again, needless to say, it was a splendid conference. Thanks to everybody who attended one of my sessions about .NET Interoperability: the pre-conference workshop for beginners, the session for beginners, and the advanced, or as I like to call it, the “Black Belt” session.

Oh my. Has it really been *THAT* long? Obviously, yes. Some folks have asked me if I stopped blogging. No, I did not. I just took a way long break from it (which will likely resume the instant I hit the Post button), as I was busy working on other things such as How do I videos for NAV (you can…

If you ask me what the top addition to the NAV technology stack over the past few years is – it’s .NET interoperability. A lot of folks, maybe you as well, would disagree, and say it’s Web services. They are important. But if you are a NAV developer, Web services don’t make your life any easier.

You know about PRS (Partner Ready Software) , don’t you? It’s the initiative started by Mark Brummel , Eric Wauters (Waldo) , and Gary Winter (not necessarily in this order), and then they decided to expand their team by one more member. I am not quite sure if this was a good move, but the time will tell.

A couple of months ago, when I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter if anybody knows how to move a WordPress blog to another domain, everybody said that I was crazy. You don’t do these things, they said. And yet, when they heard the reason why I was about to leave my old domain, everybody agreed.

MSDN has started running a series of the How do I… videos for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 ( feed here ). The idea is to showcase a technical feature in 5-15 minutes. The project is still ongoing, but a number of videos have just been released and announced on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog .

With .NET Interoperability around, it’s very likely you’ll be synchronously calling external web services from C/AL, to exchange data. I won’t go into discussing whether or not this kind of architecture is good (my own position is that it isn’t), you may end up having situations where your C/AL code simply makes a synchronous call to external systems, such as web services.