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In the last post, I explained how to use tasks, but I didn’t explain yet how to make them useful. Tasks are most useful when they automate certain file operations, and gulp helps with reading and writing files.

Now that you know how to get gulp up and running in VS Code , and how to export tasks from your gulp file , let’s talk about tasks themselves. What are they, what are they good for, and how to write them. Gulp – being a task automation tool – is all about tasks.

In my last post I covered the very basics of getting started with gulp in VS Code. It was all about getting gulp up and running under the hood of VS Code, and about writing your very first gulp task. It didn’t do much, but it showed you what gulpfile.js is good for and how to export tasks from it, that you can later use from VS Code.

Strange times. I never stop to be amazed with the kinds tools that invaded our pristine development environments. One of those tools is gulp , and if you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry. Why should you hear of it? A couple of weeks ago I introduced my talk on gulp by explaining how I made it simplify and speed up my development of control add-ins.

Nearly two and a half years ago I had a dream. It was about codeunit references and codeunit interfaces . And today, nearly two and a half years later I am still here, still having the same dream. We still cannot do codeunit interfaces in AL. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need them. We do. We badly do.

Happy new year everyone! Last year was a bit slow for me, until the very end, when I churned out a year’s worth of posts just in two days. I hope this year to be a bit different, and let me kick-start it with a concept I’ve been playing with recently.

The last of the NAV TechDays 2018 demo series comes with a little story. While Waldo and I were preparing the “Evolution of the Titan” session, on Sunday before the conference, we were brainstorming the ideas of what would constitute a cool non-visual JavaScript demo.

One of the more effective, and probably completely unexpected, demos at Waldo’s and mine NAV TechDays 2018 session was the user profile picture demo. I say “completely unexpected” is that it shows something that you normally don’t expect from control add-ins.

Eric Sevareid famously said that the chief cause of problems is solutions . The same applies to the HTML trick I blogged about yesterday. As soon as you solve the problem of using HTML directly in your control add-ins, another problem arises: what do you do with actual images your control add-in includes?

I usually post my NAV TechDays demo stuff for you to use and abuse, and this year won’t be an exception. There are three changes, to previous years, specially the last year. First, you won’t need to wait until New Year’s Eve for me to post my stuff. Second, I’ll blog each of the demos individually, because of the third reason.