AL Language

Today I’ve streamed the Fun with Interfaces video blog at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMHL32c5mg and the recording is now published online. This was the first session I ever delivered about interfaces, and I actually planned delivering this a lot earlier (I made a suggestion to run this at Directions ASIA before corona crisis hit), but never had a chance.

A lot of us still have a ton of C/AL code sitting around in existing databases that sooner or later will have to be moved into AL. A lot of us also have a ton of AL code using DotNet that we want to be able to run in Microsoft’s cloud (that is: not on-prem).

Thanks to everyone who watched my live stream today! The audience wasn’t big, but it’s a very narrow topic, not of broad interest. Still, I am glad I got a few interesting questions that actually introduced my future topics quite nicely. You can find the recording here: As promised, I have published the GetImageResource.js file on my GitHub.

The community often criticizes Microsoft for adding new platform features only when Microsoft needed them. Well, it has been a bit too harsh – Microsoft did add improvements in other situations, too. But still, if you compare it to other Microsoft’s languages like TypeScript or C#, the AL language isn’t really advancing.

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.

As a part of preparation for my last event of this year that concludes the conference season 2017 for me, I played around with the latest addition to the AL language stack for VS Code: control add-ins. If you haven’t already tried it out, or heard about it, then you should get yourself a copy of…

The “Invoking Azure Functions from AL using Visual Studio Code” webinar is over, and it was a pleasure delivering it for you, folks. There were 350+ people registered for it, and over 200+ people attended it. With those kinds of stats, who wouldn’t want to deliver more of these?

One elegant way of replacing your .NET interoperability code with something else is by using Azure Functions. Sounds good in theory, but what does it take in practice? And what are Azure Functions, anyway? Let me not take too much latitude, and let me just say that Azure Functions are a way of…

Progress often doesn’t look like progress at all when it first arrives. When on July 3, 1886, Daimler Benz presented his first car, it had a 0.75 horse-power engine that could reach a top speed of 16 km/h. It was able to cover 45 km on a single fuel tank, and it could only take two passengers.