Development

If it does what the documentation says it does, I can only say: “Build this man a statue!” Awesome job. — Waldemar Brakowski (@wbrakowski365) September 11, 2021 One of the biggest obstacles to AL team development (is there any other kind?) is object IDs. IDs are supposed to be easy: just pick the next free one and off you go.

I said a word or two about progress last week. Apparently, VS Code is not the only place where we take a small step back to be able to make a huge leap forward; .NET might seem like another one. You know it, right?

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.

There are situations when you’ll want to call Web services from C/AL, and those Web services might be protected by certificate that your local machine cannot validate directly. Web service might be secured with a self-signed certificate, or by a certificate obtained from an authority that is not globally trusted.

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.

[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.

On Monday, June 15th I have delivered another session in Microsoft’s Road to Repeatability series of online demos about technical NAV features, this time covering Client Extensibility. The session went through both the .NET and JavaScript aspects of client extensibility, and again – I promised to post all of the demos and content from the session on my blog.

I stand corrected. A month ago I wrote about how to pass JSON from JavaScript to C/AL and then handle it inside, and what I wrote is not wrong, but I just figured a simpler way. Too bad all this is not documented, but hey – that’s why blogging is fun.

Yesterday, I said I was closing this year of blogging, but I wasn’t really. Closing a year with 39 posts, and leaving a question lingering, wouldn’t be too fair, would it? If you read my last postabout how to pass objects from C/AL to JavaScript , you must have wondered if it’s possible to also pass objects from JavaScript back to C/AL.

Many cool things often go undocumented. I’ve just stumbled upon one of those, and it comes in handy to close this year of blogging. Imagine this situation: you have a server-side .NET object, that you want to pass on to the client.