NAV

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.

Have you ever needed to connect to the Web services of one NAV instance from another one? If so, I bet that the approach was something like this: you created a .NET class where you defined a Web or Service reference to the target instance, and then you consumed that .NET class using .NET Framework interoperability.

Marketing is nice as long as it matches the reality. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, Microsoft has promised a lot of improvements, but how well does NAV 2013 stand the reality test? Apparently, outstandingly well. Over the past two days, I have intensively tested NAV 2009 and NAV 2013 through a series of five different tests that measure different aspects of NAV data handling.

I’m right now sitting in the virtual lobby of the NAV Expert Panel Session of the NAV day of the Decisions Spring 2012 conference. The panel features three MVPs, three book authors, and established members of the NAV community: Eric Wauters, Matt Traxinger, Steven Renders, Brent Fisher and myself.

Make sure not to miss Decisions , the virtual conference about Microsoft Dynamics, by MSDynamicsWorld.com . It’s starting next Monday, and I hope you already have it in your calendar. It’s a four day conference, a day per Dynamics flavor (SL is the only one not being served). The best of all – it’s free!

A couple of days ago, at a Sure Step 2010 training at Sundsgården, Helsingborg, Sweden, while students were preparing to take the exam, one of the students asks me where she can download Sure Step 2010. I give her the link, but she tells me: “No, that’s Sure Step 2012, I’d like to download 2010” .

The summer was hot in this part of the world, and Stratus only helped keep the heat up. We were not only snorkeling through the summer, we did a lot of work to keep up with our goal of going live in September, and we are still on track. So far so good.

I’ve been asked too many times why I am not blogging more about Stratus, the web client for NAV developed by my company. People really want to know about it, and I am really keeping it far too silent. Let’s change that. Instead of sending a ridiculous amount of e-mails every day, I’ll just keep you all posted through this blog.

If you are a follower of Mibuso.com you may already know that they are organizing NAV TechDays in Antwerp, Belgium, on September 29 and 30, a conference dedicated to all NAV developers, solution architects and technical folks in general.