Automation

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. However, if you need to perform a transformation, then you need to look for plugins that can get that work done for you.

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.

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.

Handling Excel files in NAV 2013 (including R2) is not as easy as it seems at first. The Excel Buffer table – an obvious choice of the old days – supports only Open XML format (*.xlsx), and Excel Interoperability implementation seems a bit buggy (check the comments in my old post about .NET interoperability: https://vjeko.com/blog/the-beauty-and-the-beast-nav-and-net ).