Business Central Development

Long time no see, but that’s how it gets every now and then, I guess… Anyway, I am still alive, still kicking, just don’t get to blog as much as I’d hope for, it’s work, and life and universe and everything. So, I am back with not a typical “Vjeko” post, just a simple AL opinion piece. A tip, without a trick.

I’ve been absent for a while – sometimes it’s difficult to find time for blogging even when I want it. Anyway… here’s the last post in the introductory series of posts that explain my NAV TechDays 2019 demos. In this code example, I explain the difference between typical development and production build configurations, and I show how to configure gulp accordingly.

After a short absence, I am back. The next lesson in the Control Add-ins Supercharged series I am introducing Babel . “Babel is a JavaScript compiler” , says babeljs.io. So, what’s the big deal, you may ask? The big deal is that Babel will take your super-fancy high-end future-generation JavaScript…

One of good practices of writing C/AL Code for Microsoft Dynamics NAV since the dawn of civilization was annotating (commenting) code changes. If you are not sure what I mean by that, this is what I am talking about: While standards varied about > vs +, or < vs -, or what the annotations should include, there was absolute consensus that annotating changes is an absolute must.

So far I’ve shown how to configure gulp to help you with some basic JavaScript development tasks, such as bundling and minifying, and how to automate builds on every source file change. Let’s now take it to an entirely new level: debugging.

Yesterday you’ve seen how to use gulp to make it do something truly useful: bundling your JavaScript and CSS files. Introducing gulp for the purpose of bundling your files allows you to split your functionality into as many files as you want, but use only a single script and a single stylesheet file from your control add-in.

My last demo introduces gulp, an amazingly simple task automation tool. You’ve seen what it is, how to set it up, and how to create a simple hello-world task. Now it’s time to teach gulp some useful tricks and make it automate the “build” process for the JavaScript and CSS files.

Get ready for the next big step in taking the control add-in development to the next level. Today, I am (re)introducing gulp. I’ve blogged about gulp in the past, but I’ve never really finished that series. Life and work got in the way.

In the last example I put online, we’ve noticed that it was difficult to achieve a good separation of concerns in the front end if we are building UI directly through DOM . Apart from the fact that it’s very inefficient, manipulating DOM directly makes it very difficult to structure your front-end logic.

If you know me, you know that I am obsessed with separation of concerns . It’s the core principle of good design, and good design is what I am always striving for. The original Control Add-ins Supercharged example showcased how most of non-web developers (a category into which most of AL developers…