C/AL

Last week I delivered the C/SIDE Development course for partner community in Zagreb . As always, questions abound afterwards. Today, I’ve got a question from an attendee: “What’s the best way to print a report in multiple languages?”. Up front: this is NOT a technical post.

Last Friday, while enjoying a not-at-all healthy Salisbury steak with cheese, I had an interesting discussion with a partner: should NAV consultancies create default databases? A default database (in this context) is a packaged solution built upon standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV, where a…

Don’t you just love when users come up with new feature ideas at a microprocessor clock rate. Even before you finish developing one, five new requests pop up. This is a disease, and it’s called featuritis ! Featuritis doesn’t mean the features are just sporadically requested and developed ad hoc.

Hint: this is a post for developers, and mostly junior developers, those who are still learning how to code properly. I know, I promised not to blog about stuff like this, but I simply couldn’t help this time. A friend of mine has asked me for help. “There is this C/AL function I had to rewrite, now I end up with 106 BEGINs, and only 105 ENDs.

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?

In Croatia, most of roads resemble battlefields. They are so full of holes and patches from all kinds of repairs over time, that they have to re-pave them every five years or so. It is an awful waste of taxpayer’s money, and makes you wish for the world of Jennifer Government to come be.

Development is an important phase of implementation of a highly-customizable ERP system, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and that’s why I put a lot of emphasis on development, specifically on coding part of it. I’ve tried to cover a few do’s and don’ts of coding, but so far I’ve left one of my favorite clay pigeons out: hardcoding.

Few days ago, when I wrote about coding, I didn’t have a slightest idea that at the same time, at the completely opposite part of the globe, Dave was blogging almost about the same thing . It is interesting to know that I am not the only one out there actually worying about code, and how it looks like.

Code is boring. It is geeky. And it’s ugly, too. In C/AL it is especially ugly. While contemporary development tools come with all sort of gizmos which make coding easier, such as color-coding, auto-completion, refactoring, etc., C/AL editor seems like having awaken from a thousand-year sleep.

It has been a while since I was here, and I will not try to make any excuses. I could say that I have been busy (which would be true), and that I have a family that I love spending my time with (which would also be true), but true reason is the one you all know: I have been lazy.