What's New

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Release Wave 1 is out (whoa, that was a mouthful) with some new perks for developers . Today, I had another live session at http://vjeko.live , and I made it both the first one in the series of What’s New for the latest release, as well as the episode four of Fun with Interfaces.

One of great new functional features of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is preview posting. It allows you to preview all the entries that would result from posting a document or a general journal. Preview posting is not a simple thing. If it was, Microsoft would have delivered it years ago.

Well, control add-ins are not new in NAV 2016, they have been around for a long time now. But, they have been improved and this blog post is about these improvements. Of course, the improvements are exclusively in the Web client framework, not the Windows client, and I am educated-guessing here…

If this was a joke, then it would be one of those good-news-bad-news jokes. So which one do you want first? To stay true to all jokes of this kind, I’ll start with good news first. Good news is, you now have TryFunction s, that return true if no error happens, and false if an error happens inside them.

Three years ago I was doing a presentation about something or other about NAV at a non-NAV conference. That’s in front of normal developers. And you can imagine what their impression was of the state of the technology when, in front of a couple of hundred mostly C# developer, I opened the C/AL editor.

In case you missed it, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 is now available for download at PartnerSource. Follow this link to download your copy today: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/northamerica/support/support-news/msdnav2015download The download page contains the W1 version along with 20 country versions.

Once upon a time, and really not such a long time ago, there was no such thing as a codenit type. In all honesty, there is still no such thing as a codeunit type – there is subtype , though. (Why we have subtypes, without having types, beats me, but let’s let the semantics go.) Nowadays, we have four codeunit types.

Before NAV 2013 R2 the “database schema synchronization” was an unknown term. Either you could do a database schema change, or you couldn’t. There was no such thing as data loss. If you wanted to change a field type or delete a field (or delete the whole table for that matter), and there was data in that field in the table, you got an error.

Have you noticed already that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the text variables can have unlimited length? That’s quite a leap ahead of the previous versions which couldn’t handle more than 1024 characters per variable. If you wanted to achieve bug-free code then, when you were assigning texts around, you had to concatenate the result down to the MAXSTRLEN of the target text.

A small but important change often slips under the radar of the What’s New kinds of documents. One of those is the standard length of the Name field in G/L Account table. I’ve just noticed that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the length of this field has been increased from 30 characters to 50 characters.