Mark Brummel

Daddy again

2008-09-26T07:26:00Z

Last night I became a Daddy again.

Her name is Saskia. She weighs 3300 grams and is 46 centimeters long.

Item Tracking upgrade from 3.x to 5.0

2008-09-21T20:22:00Z

Recently we completed a very complex upgrade from version 3.10 to 5.0. This project was done together with Liberty Grove Software in the USA.

The company involved has a period where they are extremely busy. In that period the performance was terrible. It was holding up the business.

We examined the database and decided to do a full upgrade to 5.0 and migrate them to SQL 2005.

The most difficult part was Item Tracking. This was highly customised in their situation. I've learned a lot during this upgrade and some of those things I want to share.

In the old database there were two tables.

6500 - Item Tracking Line
6501 - Item Tracking Entry

The 6500 table contained all open document information; 6501 had posting information.

In 5.0 this has been replaced with 3 tables. two existing and 1 new

336 - Tracking Specification
337 - Reservation Entries
32 - Item Ledger Entries

This is not per-se a bad change, but I do not like using the 337 table. This table is already used by to many different funcionalities in NAV. I do like using the ILE as single posting entry instead of 6501.

So how does it work.

When you assign a tracking number on a new document, a new record is created in table 337. This is connected to the master line by some fields:

* 10 Source Type Integer
* 11 Source Subtype Option
* 12 Source ID Code 20
* 13 Source Batch Name Code 10
* 14 Source Prod. Order Line Integer
* 15 Source Ref. No. Integer

Depending on what is the source table some fields are left empty. Please note that the 6500 Item Tracking Line had the same constuction, difference however is that the old version had another field: The source line table record had a pointer to the 6500 table as well. This has been dropped. Probably because of reduncancy and locking issues.

The record stays in 337 as long as the document is not posted. Once the document is posted as receipt, the record in 337 disapears. The ILE is created. For some reason, a new record is created in table 336. This record looks like 337 but has a different key. The key is equal to the key of the ILE. Once the document is invoiced the 336 gets checked to the ILE and dissapears as wel.

I really am puzzled why this complex structure exists. The form to assign tracking (6510) has become much more complex since it supports both 336 and 337 records in one form based on temporary data. It is your worst nightmare,

We've done quire a few redesign in order to make it work. Problem was that the customer added about 50 custom fields to both the 6500 and 6501 table.

I am curious to hear other experiences with upgading this.

Result is a better database. The performance is perfect. So far we only measured two very short blocking situations during the first production week and no deadlocks or locktimeouts

To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade

2008-09-21T19:52:00Z

That's the question.

It's about two years ago since I started working with Liberty Grove Software, a certified upgrade service center. I've helped them establish a european office. Since that time we've done about 12 upgrades together.

Upgrades has always been a problem in the Navision world. The methodology is there and clear. The problem is not the methodology but the nature of Navision.

Navision is a very flexible development environment which easily allows bad development. Since Navision is easy to learn and real developers are hard to find, a lot of bad code has been written by people who shouldn't have tried.

The question of weather or not to upgrade can (IMHO) be answered by answering the question: "How much code is in the database that should not be there".

No matter what version you some from: If the customisations where done, the way they supposed to be done, anyone can upgrade the database, even if that one does not know the modificatios or the customers business.

So the next question is: how do you find out if there are these kind of modifications in the database.

This is a very hard question to answer. Most upgrade service centers have a list of versions and modifications which are dangerous like

Use if bincode in older versions (replaced by WMS)
CRM in 2.6
Jobs to 5.0 from older versions
Item tracking in 3.x

But these are the easy ones. I've seen:

Abusing standard Navision fields for other functionality instead of adding fields
Modifying ledger entries wihtout the posting routines
IF INSERT THEN DELETE statement in OnDelete trigger (As workaround for flowfields on Native)
COMMIT in middle of posting routine

So if you are considering an upgrade, start with a health check of your system. This will give you valuable information that helps in the decision of uprading or reimplementing. Some systems should not be upgraded.

Another issue is performance.

Most customers think that to go to SQL, a full upgrade is enevitable. This is not true.

A lot of customers started on 2.x 10 years ago and are very happy with the functionality. The system is customised to their needs and legal changes have been built in or downgraded. But what to do when the company or database grows.

Good news. A 2.x database is very suitable to run in a SQL2005 environment. The datastructure is much simpler compared to 3.x and higher. If performance is an issue and the functionality is solid than a SQL upgrade is your thing. This will also provide Vista and Terminal Server 2008 support.

Off-cource, a technical review and benchmark is required for a safe project

MYTH - SQL Filter Order

2008-09-19T13:12:00Z

Hi all,

Hynek at SQL Perform asked me to publish something about a myth being spread by some Microsoft specialists.

MYTH:

"Make sure that the order of the fields used for filtering is the same as order of these fields in the key."

REALITY:

Certainly the order of the filtering does NOT matter, nor in Classic, nor SQL Server. The driver does issue the filters according to the key anyway (because on classic it narrows the index tree...).

See an example below:

ItemLedgerEntry.SETCURRENTKEY(

"Item No.",Open,"Variant Code",Positive,"Location Code","Posting Date", "Expiration Date","Lot No.","Serial No.");

ItemLedgerEntry.SETRANGE("Lot No.",'HELLO WORLD');

ItemLedgerEntry.SETRANGE("Posting Date",WORKDATE);

ItemLedgerEntry.SETRANGE("Item No.",'70000');

ItemLedgerEntry.SETRANGE(Open,TRUE);

IF ItemLedgerEntry.FIND('-') THEN;

With Client Monitor on (or using SQL Profiler) you would see the SQL Statement is:

SELECT * FROM "CRONUS International Ltd_$Item Ledger Entry" WITH (READUNCOMMITTED)

WHERE (("Item No_"='70000')) AND (("Open"=1)) AND (("Posting Date"={ts '2007-10-30 00:00:00.000'})) AND (("Lot No_"='HELLO WORLD'))

ORDER BY "Item No_","Open","Variant Code","Positive","Location Code","Posting Date","Expiration Date","Lot No.","Serial No."

Where do you see 'HELLO WORLD'? Which was the first filter applied?

As you could see the driver issues the filters in the order of the key. Actually it does not matter in what order these are in SQL Server either, but that is another story...

The code just looks tidier and nicer if you do it as they suggest, perhaps a really high price for everybody to go through all the "offending" code and correct.

Dynamics NAV and SQL2008

2008-08-29T07:22:00Z

Just recently SQL 2008 got status RTM and is ready to use in production systems.

At SQL Perform we are always very careful with new releases and eager to test them for performance, reliability and management capabilities.

What better way to start than with your own database. So we installed SQL 2008 on Windows 2008 on our VMWare server.

After the normal procedure of setting traceflag 4616 and attaching the stored procedures it was possible to create a new database.

The database got version number 100 which is the internal version number for 2008.

So as from today we'll start using 2008 and explore the capabilities.

Officialy it is not yet supported I guess.

We are using the CTP3 build for NAV 2009 and combine both the classic and the Role Tailored client.

I tested also with Navision 4.0 SP3 update 8 and this works as well.

One of the first things I noticed was autocomplete and syntax hints. Wow! I am in heaven.

Results and new interesting features will be posted as soon as possible. We also moved our analysis databases to the SQL2008 which are regular SQL databases we use for measuring performance at our customers.

More information on www.sqlperform.nl

SQL Perform Benelux

2008-07-16T14:13:00Z

No technical information or tips and tricks this time but a personal message.

Since today my company Brummel Dynamics Services B.V. no longer exists. Instead I joined with SQL Perform.

Together with Ludo Van den Ende we started up SQL Perform Benelux, a subsidiary from SQL Perform Ltd.

The plans for this started some months ago when I realised that my company was growing out of my control. I already hired my collueage Martijn Smit to help me but still we could not keep up with the demand.

When Ludo told me about his plans to start his own company the deal was swiftly made, especialy when Hynek Muhlbacher agreed on the idea.

At this moment over 80 customers in The Netherlands and Belgium are using the SQL Perform Tools and our services for over 200 databases. We work for more than 15 partners helping them to get the maximum benefit out of SQL Server. Not only performance but realiability as wel.

I would like to thank everyone for all the trust in me and supporting me. I am really exited about this next step for my company.

For this moment I am going on vacation to get some new energy.

VMWare continued and results

2008-06-08T18:58:00Z

As promised I have some results from the tests.

So we compared HP ML 370 with 14 SAS disks dedicated to a HP DL380 with data on a HP MSA2000 SAS SAN running on VMWare with the same amounts of disks.

The DL380 is running on VMWare. The OS is on a shared storrage with the OS of the other VMWare machines.

We did the tests using the benchmark toolkit and some manual processes. The measuring was done using the SQL Perform Tools.

Besides comparing VMWare and SAN/DAS we compared 5.0 SP1 to RTM.

The results of the VMWare / DAS comparison are amazing. They are almost the same.

Heavy testing shows that VMWare is just slightly slower in posting but only 5% maximum.

Results of manual reading

1. 5.0 RTM on VMWare/SAN
2. 5.0 SP1 on VMWare/SAN
3. 5.0 RTM on Windows/DAS
4. 5.0 SP1 on Windows/DAS

Manual reading means opening stuff like G/L and running some reports

Differences are minimal (5 - 10%)

Results of benchmark posting

1. 5.0 SP1 on Windows/DAS
2. 5.0 RTM on Windows/SAN

3. 5.0 SP1 on VMWare/SAN
4. 5.0 RTM on VMWare/SAN

A big remark here is that on SP1 we actualy needed some index hints! We got deadlocks we did not have on 5.0 RTM. I will blog about that later.

The customer is live now. This week we will continue to measure.

It is amazing to see VMWare running and the management and failover capabilities. For me it means the end of active passive clusters.

So is there still value of logshipping/log backups? Definately yes! At this customer we will put an old server in a separate room, far away from the server room. This will be the log shipping server.

If anything goes terribly wrong in the serverroom there will be a server with a max. 5 minutes old database.

Remember that even if everything is redundant the server can catch fire or water damage. This happens; really,

One of the things the customer has to do is place an extra airconditioning unit. The double MSA2000 is producing so much heat that the temperature raised 5 degrees! Plus the airconditioning is redunant to.

From one of my other customers (Katoen Natie) I got some tips.

- Use ESX version 3.5 Update 1. ESX 3.0.2 gives blue screens gehad on SQL 2005 x64 machines.

- Disable Hyperthreading in BIOS of HP.

- Place disks on VMFS volumes.

- Install Windows 2003 SP2 + patches.

- Give all machines 1 vCPU or 2 vCPU’s, but no 4.

- Install machines from scratch and use the correct HAL gebruikt (Computer Management – Device Manager – Computer). for a 1 vCPU this must be the Uniprocessor HAL zijn. The Multiprocessor HAL works to but gives worse performance. With +2 vCPU’s thus must be Multiprocessor HAL.

(Thanks to SAMMY BOGAERT)

FYI: KTN has over 100 Navision databases and is a SQL Perform user. We are very proud of that.

We verified all KTN's suggestions with our VMWare expert and found out that this is their default setup. :) They are great expers. More information on www.dewal-ict.nl

Best regards,

Mark Brummel

SQL Perform Benelux B.V.

www.sqlperform.com

Navision, Win2003 R2, SQL2005 x64 & ... VMWare

2008-05-26T13:38:00Z

Today we are installing SQL2005 on a VMWare environment.

We already support several customers on VMWare but this is the first time we are actually doing the migration.

This customer was looking for a failover system for the entire network which was easy to mangage since they do not have in house IT.

Together with a VMWare specialist, the infrastucture supplier and the NAV partner we designed a new configuration.

All current servers will be replaced by 2 new HP DL380 machines and 2 MSA2000 SAN's.

It is pretty state of the art since the MSA2000 is the first SAN apart from the EVA which supports SAS technology.

The 380 machines are equiped with 18GB of RAM and 2 Quadcore CPU's.

In total the system will host several servers.

* Domain controler
* File server
* Print server
* Exchange server
* SQL Server
* Terminal Server
* A 3rd party server with a Sybase database system.

The MSA2000 has a capacity of 24 SAS disks with currently 20 disks installed. The connection is 4GB fibre.

Since it is a VMWare system the OS is on the SAN.

For Navision on SQL we have reserved 2 disks for the log, 2 disks for tempdb and 8 disks for data.

The current server is a ML370 with 14 on board SAS disks.

We will use the NAV benchmark toolkit and the SQL Perform tools to compare the VMWare performance to the current performance.

Plan is to also use the SP1 client but this will be tested seperately.

Locking issue in 4.0 SP 3 Hotfix 6

2007-12-14T08:42:00Z

This is an important message for everyone using this hotfix.

A bug was introduced causing messages and errorboxes to maintain locks. This issue was also in 3.70 and solved in build 19868 back then.

I won't get emotional about this bug but dissapointed describes my feelings best.

Please read this post http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=107585#107585 for more information.

If you are looking for NAV platform updates or platform hotfixes you can benefit from this site if you already know the knowledgebase article number:

https://support.microsoft.com/contactus2/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1410&WS=hotfix

The kb article is kb945349

It will be published asap.

MS Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 NL has been released

2007-10-17T10:00:00Z

Announcement
Microsoft Dynamics™ Entrepreneur Solution 2008 for the Netherlands is released and made available for download on this page. Microsoft Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 is an integrated, adaptable business management solution designed to meet the needs of small businesses. Microsoft Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 is built on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform. It enables companies to streamline their core business functions—such as finance, purchasing, and sales and marketing—to provide insight across their organization and improve the efficiency of their operations. Microsoft Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 works with Microsoft technologies, and works like and together with software and solutions employees may already know. Microsoft Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 brings together people, processes, and technologies, helping increase the productivity and effectiveness of businesses, so they can drive business success.

Documents
This is the first version of Microsoft Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 and therefore there are no Change Doc or Known Issues.

Support
Please use Microsoft Premiere Online to file support requests for Microsoft Dynamics Entrepreneur Solution 2008 (requires a Partner Advantage Plan).

Page on PartnerSource (requires login & password): https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/downloads/releases/entrepreneur.htm

Source: www.mibuso.com

General Information

The product is basicaly just Navision with an extra layer for small companies. They have not deleted any objects so manufacturing and jobs are still there but not accessible from the menu.

The menusuite has been redesigned to use new objects. These are more simple objects that are easier to use for small companies.

What is very strange is that it uses a lot of (conditional) formatting and use of multiple subforms. This is not supported in the 6.0 client.

How can Microsoft release new software that cannot be supported in a new version! This is documented in their own whitepapers.

This product has great potential but the way it has been designed proofs that the new client of 6.0 has to limmited possibilities

Update 6 for Navision 4.0 SP3: BE CAREFUL

2007-09-14T07:22:00Z

This week Microsoft released update 6 for Navision 4.0 SP3. Mainly a lot of SQL fixes, or so they say.

At first I thought that it was a combination of update 1, 4 & 5 but that seems not to be the case.

What they seem to have done is enable indexhints out of the box. This was already possible in older versions but it was by default disabled.

Be aware that installing this update without profesional help can lead to very unexpected behaviour.

It is indeed true that you can work around the SQL2005 bug with an index hint. But in the cases I have seen it usualy takes 4 or 5 to make the system work. The Microsoft solution can be a "little" overkill.

The update comes without documentation but there is some. Please contact your local Microsoft hub or SQL Perform for more information.

Still we need to put as much preasure as possible on Microsoft to keep working on better SQL support.

Is Navision to stupid or is SQL to smart

2007-08-21T19:28:00Z

Currenly I am again fighting with SQL2005 at a customer.

Many, many reads on tables whilst there are perfect and selective indexes.

Now I've never experienced this problem on SQL2000. SQL always uses the right index for the query.

I also know Navision has not changed the communication with SQL.

What has happend to SQL2005?? What have they changed that causes this major bug!

There are plenty of workarounds like index hinting and adding the recomile option, but surely this is not a solution. It takes like forever to find the bad queries and find a way to solve them. You do not want to create a indexhint for every query, that would mean that you have Native behaviour again.

The problem seems to be (IMHO) in the clustered index. SQL2005 is much more keen on that than SQL2000. Every SQL expert loves to spend hours and hours to think about the proper clustered index for a table.

If you show the indexplan of Navision to a SQL expert they will laugh. Every entry table is custered by the entry no whilst in the SQL world it is normal to cluster on the most common selective filtered field.

So what is this field in Navision. Let's have an example.

Take the customer ledger entries for example. They could be clustered by Customer No. and Posting Date. But what about filtering on Document No.? Or External Document No.? What about Transaction No. or the Open boolean.

Maybe we should redesign this table for SQL. If Customer No. is the proper clustered index and Document No. is used by Navigate, then maybe we need Navigate Entries? This can be a small join table which is very common in relational databases.

Then we have the Open field. What a nightmare. What if we add a new table to Navision. Just for open entries? This is a small and compact table with fewer entries than your historical entry table.

Last but not least we have the apply to field. This can be very easily solved using a temporary table in a singleinstance codeunit. When a entry is selected you just copy that entry to the codeunit and you read this when applying the entries.

Will redesigning NAV solve the SQL2005 issues? Maybe, maybe not. Fact is that every day maybe hundreds of installations suffer from this issue and it starts to become a real problem for partners since "solving" costs a lot of time and is often not billable.

Any thoughts or comments are more than welcome.

How To - Use the SourceTableTemporary property

2007-08-07T20:42:00Z

The SourceTableTemporary is a new property introduced in 5.0 giving all kinds of new capabilities of showing data that is not even in the database.

Instead of showing real data from the database, the form is running on an empty table when starting up, so you will have to populate it with data.

Step 1.

Create a normal form with the wizard and define your sourcetable. Select the columns you want to (ab)use.

Make sure to select the SourceTableTemporary property.

In our example we will use table 18, Customer and select columns No. and Name.

Step 2.

Create a new function "InitTempTable"

In this function define a Local variable "Cust", type Record, Subtype 18. (Customer).

Write the following piece of C/AL Code

Code:

Cust.SETFILTER(Balance, '>1000');
Cust.SETFILTER("Country/Region Code" , 'NL');
If Cust.FINDSET THEN REPEAT
Rec := Cust;
INSERT;
UNTIL Cust.NEXT = 0;

Cust.SETFILTER(Balance, '>500');
Cust.SETFILTER("Country/Region Code" , '<>NL');
If Cust.FINDSET THEN REPEAT
Rec := Cust;
INSERT;
UNTIL Cust.NEXT = 0;

Step 3

Go to the OnOpenForm trigger and put the new function in there.

Result

A view of your customers with a filter that is normaly not possible with the normal filters still available.

The idea and example are from form 634 Chart of Accounts Overview in 5.0. You'll also find a great example there of how to expand and collapse.

For a customer I've built a view combining 2 tables based on a date filter with quantities summed up from other tables. It is very easy to use and setup and when using proper indexing the performance is perfect.

Good luck.

Announcement: The NAV Development book

2007-07-20T08:22:00Z

Finaly it will be there, a complete guide for NAV development written by an indepentant party.

I can personaly recommend this book, I know David Studebaker very well and have reviewed the book for him.

The book is very complete and contains very valuable information for beginners as well as tips for more advanced developers.

The normal price is $54.99 but there is a 20% pre-order disount.

Link:

http://www.packtpub.com/Microsoft-.NET-Dynamics-NAV-5.0-ERP-Navision/book

Reporting from TechEd 2007

2007-06-04T07:03:00Z

Today it started.

Just got of Bob's keynote's. The opening was pretty cool with Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future in his Time Machine.

For me one thing was clear after the keynotes. This is the period of integration. Although TechEd is a Microsoft Classical event there are loads of information for business developers here.

In a couple of years from now it will not be just an easy answer to a question on what application you are running.

You can have Outlook information in Dynamics or BI information in Outlook. Webservices will connect everyone and share information through companies.

Fortunately they finaly are starting to use Dynamics in their presentations. The BizzTalk demo showed Axapta.

For me it is now off to the demo booth.

This afternoon there will be a session on NAV 5.0 for (Office) integration and wednesday on 5.1 and webservices. I'll keep you updated.

Session T-SQL

Just went to this session about advanced T-SQL. It made me realise how happy we need to be with C/AL.

First he showed how to transform a comma separated sting into an array, next was how to build a pivot table. Last on the agenda was how to make a unique sales invoice number.

And then this was an advanced session.

I did however get a really good idea on how to make a hack on the number series for numbers that my have a gap.

NAV 5.0 and Integration

The session was presented by Michael Rosenørn.

This was a chalk and talk session about NAV 5.0 and integration. Well, it should have been but Michael did most of the talking which he does pretty good. :mrgreen:

One of the issues with the office xml interface is that the changing of the stylesheets is very difficult unless you like reading xml schema's.

Fortunately they have changed that and added a stylesheet manager that allowes you to create them in a wysiwyg way. Great! It will be released shortly but there is no official date.

After that he showed how easy it is to attach documents to every record and copy them from sales quotes to orders and so on.

Second part of the demo was about the outlook integration. One of the things I was less familiar with. It is very easy to set up synchronisation of e.g. Items and even have a special form for it in outlook.

Core issue here is that all end users who take NAV serious as their business product and want to upgrade in to the future 5.0 is the right version to go to TODAY. It will be mandatory for a 5.1 migration anyway and this is what you can do. It is also the perfect version to migrate to SQL server as it is pretty much pre-tuned out of the box.

Thank you very much Michael for this presentation and a great job!

Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office

For me, this was one of the biggest question marks after the announcement at Convergence San Diego.

It seems now that it is a suite of add-ins for MOSS (Sharepoint) and Office.

Weird though is that it is not a real dynamics wide solution. They showed the sharepoint client for GP and SNAP add-ins for AX.

Now we know we are getting better sharepoint integration and webservices for NAV 5.1 so that whould cover MOSS.

What about the SNAP thingy? It is a pretty cool feature where you can pull your Dynamics data out from within Word, Excel, Outlook or InfoPath but it seems to be written only for AX. It could be very usefull to have in NAV also.

Pricing is between 195 and 395$ but then again, it has not yet been released for NAV so that may change.

Database maintenance in SQL Server 2005

Now this was a really interesting one, just to get confirmed that you are doing a good job.

This guy took us though all of the steps in creating a maintenance plan. He also advised to create your own in T-SQL instead of relying on the maintenance wizzards. I think this especialy counts for NAV databases.

Also the hardware is very important for maintenance because it is an expensive job, especialy if the timewindow is small.

One of the cool new features of SQL 2005 is the online reindexing. I am very happy that this will be supported in one of the upcomming releases of the SQL Perform Tools.

I am not going in dept about this session because it had a ton of slides so if anyone has a specific question just ask.

Now off to SQL 2008.

SQL 2008 - Beyond Relational

As the name says. More integration between relational databases and external data like photo's video's documents etc.

SQL 2008 will have better integration and better performance with regarance to BLOB's. I am not quite sure how this will reflect to NAV though.

One of the other new features is the introduction of datatypes for geological positioning. For example when you add coordinates to all of your customers you can do geographical analysis bases on ZIP code regions.

One of the cool things whas the mentioning of better performance with full text indexing. Planning on investigating how this will affect the funny queries NAV users are somtimes making.

Best practices for large datawarehouses

This was a really interesting session about handling large tables (50GB+) on SQL Server.

What you really must take away here is that it is very important to think about your index plan, clustered index and even datatypes.

One special thing they reccomend is to replace the datetime datatype with an integer like '20060215'. Also always put the date as the last field in your indexes.

My guess is this will become more and more important because customers databases are getting larger and larger.

Office Excel and Analysis services, an In-Depth look at integration

Analysis services for me is the future for reporting. Especialy if you have larger databases where you do not want spooky queries running around in your OLTP database.

Excel has some really great features to work with analysis services and show the cubes in either Pivot tables or you can work with the new CUBE functions. These functions let you exacly determine per cel what part of the CUBE data you want to see.

Imaging putting conditional formating over that and publish that onto an excel service.

Your management can view excel data as html and have real time data from the datawarehouse that is connected to the NAV backend system.

NAV 5.1 and Webservices

This was a very cool session about the new client and webservices.

This session was loaded! There were no more seats and people had to stand. That is so great for the future of Dynamics on TechEd.

I have spoken to more C/AL developers these few days than on all other TechEds together.

I have seen and played with the new client a lot the last couple of months and they are really doing an incredible job in stabelising the system and make it really friendly to work with. Once you know your way it is really easy to navigate and highly customisable. Users can change the look and feel of the pages and the menu's.

One of the cool things is that the menusuite also renders the same way as the old 3.x menu's.

One of the other cool things is the error pane which shows all of the error and you can swich to the error after you clicked on it.

Also the reports look so much cooler in SSRS. There are graphs and colors on them.

One of the cool things Micheal Rosenorn showd is the freezepane which you can use to freeze a couple of colums and scroll through the rest just like in excel.

Then there are the webservices.

This has really been done the Navision way, using the KISS model. Keep it simple.

Basicaly what you can do is expose both codeunits and pages as a webservice. Now codeunits may sound obvious but a page is a ui contol right? Well, a ui contol is for dataentry and modification and so is a webservice. The page definition will decide which fields you have and on what order the validation is done.

So how do I make a websevice, well this is very complex. Step 1 is to go to a new system table called webservices and create a line saying this page or codeunit is a webservice. There is no step 2.

Now you can use all the members of the object as a webservice from visual studio, office, or sharepoint, or other app's that can handle webservices.

All business logic is run and all validations are done just the way it would happen in the normal client.

Now this is also the reason to stress out why TechEd is so important for NAV partners and developers. This is the place where you can learn all about this technology and sharepoint, visual studio, SQL Server and more.

I could even make a list of session that are related to this NAV session.

That's all, long story. Please if there are any questions, just post.

Analysis services Best Practices

Now this was a real in-dept sesion about optimising MDX queries. Something every NAV partner with large installations should dive into.

Seems like even SSAS has performance issues, but at least your OLTP database does not suffer from it.

Visiting NetApp and EMC2

These are storrage manufaturors.

TechEd also has a huge expo where companies can promote themselves. Two of those companies are NetApp and EMC2. Since some of my high end customers (300GB +) are running on such systems I decided to visit them and ask all about their systems.

One of the issues I am having with a EMC storrage is that at one customer I have a responsetime of 2ms at the disks and at another 44ms. Very strage. But systems like these are just not simple anymore. There are nomerous ways to do mirroring and striping and setting up backup systems.

My guess it is either the fact that there are 2 filegroups on different luns or that the luns are spread over the same spindles.

An interesting fact about the NetApp is that they prefer to run on Raid 6 with double parity. They claim to have come up with a special pattented 3 layer system which can handle it on OLTP systems. Well, my customer will migrate from DAS to NetApp as soon as they have the ok for fibre connection.

Meeting the 5.1 UI guy

Although 95% of the meeting was under NDA I would lastly like to mention that friday, one hour before closing we had a guy comming to us who had worked on the orriginal project green and fenway.

He explained in detail about how every UI part was put together and why. Very cool.

One of the coolest things was though that after Microsoft took over he moved to Redmond and is now working for MS UI and was explaining to colleagues how cool the Dynamics UI was and what parts could be used for other microsoft products.

Back Home

For everyone who has been reading this post (there have been very few comments/questions) this is how it ended.

The last 1,5 days I have pretty much spent at the NAV booth. This is nice to do because it lets you talk at many people varying from dynamics experts to people who ask if it is a virus scanner.

On friday it ended and since I flew from Miami instead of Orlando I had to drive back.

My flight back had a 3,5 hour delay and my suitcase was lost, but fortunately they will bring it back tomorrow.

That's all folks for this year. I have to prepre my SQL Perform workshop for tomorrow.