Polymorphism

Today I’ve streamed the Fun with Interfaces video blog at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMHL32c5mg and the recording is now published online. This was the first session I ever delivered about interfaces, and I actually planned delivering this a lot earlier (I made a suggestion to run this at Directions ASIA before corona crisis hit), but never had a chance.

Nearly two and a half years ago I had a dream. It was about codeunit references and codeunit interfaces . And today, nearly two and a half years later I am still here, still having the same dream. We still cannot do codeunit interfaces in AL. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need them. We do. We badly do.

Whoa! This has been quite an event, the Directions EMEA 2016 in Prague. There has never been this many people (1.700+) and it was quite a pleasure connecting again with old friends, and meeting new friends. Also, it has been quite a pleasure listening to many good sessions, and an even bigger pleasure delivering four of them.

Polymorphism is a great thing. .NET, Java, C++ and other folks have enjoyed its benefits for a long time, some more than a quarter century already. Meanwhile, we, the meager C/AL bunch, can only dream about it and draft our little patterns that all come short of it if only by a tiny bit.

I’ve delved deep into design patterns story with my last two blog posts , but I am far from over. The patterns I discussed are the ones we could use up until NAV 2015 (we can still use them, of course!) but some more robust loose coupling (excuse the near-oxymoron) can be achieved with what NAV 2016 brought along: events.

Directions US 2016 (yes, 2016, sorry y’all who got the 2017 link in your mailbox) was quite an event. As Directions always is, a lot of people, enthusiastic about this market we strive to thrive in, and about the product we love no matter the limitations we often face when we aim for better, more scalable architectures.

Directions US. What more to say than: wow! This was an amazing conference, again. A lot of people, a lot of vibe, a lot of NAV. And this year, a lot to look forward to. Microsoft didn’t disappoint with the news. Dynamics 365 is here with new paradigms, apps are the new big thing, and they really are.