Business Central Development

[Updated] I had to update this post a little bit, see below for the details, but the killer feature had to go 🙁 [/Updated] Remeber that tool “ Automated Version Management ” that I published here and on Mibuso five months ago? It has just got an update: version 2.0.

I’ve just got a call for help from a partner, about their customer who has decided to move from basic inventory management to full-scale warehouse management system. The question was how to post the opening balances for existing inventory quantities in flat locations to warehouse-managed ones.

I hate it when I don’t have time to blog. I’d like if I could tell you what I’ve been doing, but let’s leave it at this: I am enjoying my vacation, away from my office, my job, my projects, my customers, my partners, and obviously – my blog. You should take a vacation, too – great stuff!

I promised to myself not to post technical stuff on this blog. But as Seth Godin said not that long ago, never’s not such a long time . And also, why shouldn’t I share a piece of useful advice if I have it. So here it goes. Have you ever started a lengthy NAV batch job, and then wondered how much longer it is really going to take?

I never really expected that my post about my laptop outperforming an 8-headed dragon of a server would draw that much attention: record number of first-day reads of any blog post on my blog ever (134), and record number of comments (11 comments, by 5 people, me included).

Never trust the customer 🙂 We were sure that the server had last service packs applied, that’s the first that we asked of the customer IT, and got a definite answer that “But, of course!”. So we didn’t really think this might be an issue. Then we noticed that SQL Server build number was 1399, while my laptop was running 3042.

I had no clue how good my laptop was. Seriously. Today it kicked ass of an 8-processor server. Tomorrow we have a go-live of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment, with manufacturing customized to support configure-to-order functionality. Refreshing manufacturing orders now calculates dynamic BOMs and routings, and it takes time.

Four months ago I attended a conference, where I had a chance to listen to Miha Kralj, an architect at Microsoft, talk about architectures. It was one of the best presentations I ever attended, and ever since I had this topic in queue, but never really had chance to write about it.

Last time, I gave you a recipe on how to do a bad thing. If you really need to do something bad, I figure it’s better to do it the way that would hurt the least, or the way that isn’t so bad after all. I wouldn’t have dreamt of a comment on that blog post, but Ian came, and gave the perfect example which really explains why things like that *ARE* bad.

Imagine that whenever you edit an object in C/SIDE Object Designer, and save it, the system automatically saves it in the version history. Imagine that it never simply overwrites your previous version, but keeps all of them there for you.