Deployment

When you spend more time in C# than C/AL, and you still tell yourself and the world around you that you are developing for NAV, then this post is for you. I already wrote a three-article series about “DLL hell” and how to resolve it, and in my last post in the series (…

If you are developing .NET assemblies for use with NAV, then sooner or later you’ll figure out that the new database deployment of add-ins in NAV 2016 is broken. I’ve just suffered through medieval torture of attempting to have my NAV forget about a database-deployed assembly.

Are you developing .NET assemblies intended to be used from C/AL? If so, then you must have realized that keeping proper track of them and managing them on the server (or client, in case you still do that) is not a simple affair. Assemblies in .NET are identified through their fully qualified name, and that’s how NAV tells one assembly from another, as well.

A few days ago I have published my PowerShell script that streamlines and automates deployment of control add-ins from Visual Studio. Over the past couple of days I have improved it a little bit, and fixed a few bugs, so here’s an updated version that is more resilient to your project structure,…

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 brings many new features, one of which is a set of PowerShell cmdlets to manage add-ins. These are: New-NAVAddIn Get-NAVAddIn Set-NAVAddIn Remove-NAVAddIn While these cmdlets are certainly useful for installation and deployment, I find them even more useful during development.

[Update, February 8, 2016: there is a new version of code from this post. Please check https://vjeko.com/dynamically-loading-assemblies-at-runtime ] Okay here we go. In this post I deliver the promised code that handles automatic deployment of all your assemblies to client and server, as needed.

Deploying .NET assemblies to clients and servers in need is no simple affair. In my last post I have explained the problem, and announced the solution. As promised, in this post I bring you the solution. To be fully honest, this post only brings the conceptual solution, just a little brain game for you to train your .NET brain muscles a bit.

Let me tell you right away if you need to read this post at all. If you never wrote a single .NET class library intended to be used as a .NET interoperability assembly from C/AL, or if you never ever deployed a .dll file into the Add-ins folder of either Service or RoleTailored Client, then you probably don’t want to read this post.

Microsoft Partners often postpone the actual purchase of the customer’s NAV license until the project is fairly close to go-live. In the meanwhile, they do the development and the testing on-site (or off-site) using their own partner license. I’ve heard arguments (or better: excuses) to engage in this practice, and I have a very strong opinion on this.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Swallowing it all at once might be tempting as it has all the potential you need to get into the next edition of Guinness World Records . Likewise, trying it with an ERP implementation has all the potential you need to get into to the next edition of Chaos Report .