Business Central

Do you know cues? Those clickable colorless stacks of documents in NAV 2009, that turned into clickable blue stack tiles in NAV 2013 R2, and that worked on top of FlowFields of type Integer? Well, in NAV 2015, this munch bunch has turned into clickable blue tiles with pictures and colorful…

In case you missed it, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 is now available for download at PartnerSource. Follow this link to download your copy today: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/northamerica/support/support-news/msdnav2015download The download page contains the W1 version along with 20 country versions.

Once upon a time, and really not such a long time ago, there was no such thing as a codenit type. In all honesty, there is still no such thing as a codeunit type – there is subtype , though. (Why we have subtypes, without having types, beats me, but let’s let the semantics go.) Nowadays, we have four codeunit types.

Before NAV 2013 R2 the “database schema synchronization” was an unknown term. Either you could do a database schema change, or you couldn’t. There was no such thing as data loss. If you wanted to change a field type or delete a field (or delete the whole table for that matter), and there was data in that field in the table, you got an error.

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.

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.

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 .

Marketing is nice as long as it matches the reality. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, Microsoft has promised a lot of improvements, but how well does NAV 2013 stand the reality test? Apparently, outstandingly well. Over the past two days, I have intensively tested NAV 2009 and NAV 2013 through a series of five different tests that measure different aspects of NAV data handling.

Performance is one of those things you can’t get enough of and NAV is one of those systems where an extra operation per second is always welcome. Yesterday, during the Expert Panel at the NAV day of the Decisions Spring conference, there was a question: is there any improvement in how NAV 2013 works on SQL Server.

Have you noticed already that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the text variables can have unlimited length? That’s quite a leap ahead of the previous versions which couldn’t handle more than 1024 characters per variable. If you wanted to achieve bug-free code then, when you were assigning texts around, you had to concatenate the result down to the MAXSTRLEN of the target text.