Mark Brummel - Author of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Application Design

Dynamics NAV 7 (2013) Exposed | The real stuff

Marq — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:35:00 GMT

With convergence 2012 a lot of NAV 7, or NAV2013 (the official name) is publically exposed.

No more secrets.

Are you not at convergence? No problem, neither am I. You can view a lot of sessions for free online via Virtual Convergence .

One of the things you can see is the new web client that will be shipped with NAV7.

This is more realistic than what I blogged about yesterday.

The web client is really cool. It enables you to do everything in the RTC from the internet.

Have fun watching the sessions!

Is this our future?

Marq — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:51:00 GMT

Today I wached the Convergence Keynotes 2012 online.

After the Always extremely boring introduction and marketing bla bla bla where were 5 amazing minutes that gave a glance into our future.

Microsoft Dynamics (NAV??) Metro style.

They converted a role center into Windows 8 tiles! Awesome!

You can really see that they basically took the cues that are on the role center and converted them into tiles.

If you watch the keynotes you can see that pages are also converted to windows 8 like apps.

This makes me really exited about the future, but hey, now I'm starting to sound like these marketing guys.

http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-shows-off-metro-style-windows-8-business-apps/

Cheers

First points for the Microsoft Dynamics Team

Marq — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 08:55:00 GMT

As you should know by now, Microsoft Dynamics is sponsoring a Formula 1 team. They sponsor Lotus F1, formerly known as Renault and prior to that Benneton and Toleman.

This morning in the first race they got 7th place with Kimi Räikkönen. Partly because of good driving and a big part of being lucky that Maldonado crashed in the last lap.

As you might read in between the lines Formula 1 is one of my great passions. The combination of Technology, Politics, Talent and of course Money makes it very interesting once you know how things relate to each other. Kind of the same with the Navision partner channel.

This does make me wonder why on earth Microsoft has decided to pick Lotus F1 out of all teams. If I were in marketing I would either pick a team that can win or a team with one or more drivers that are good at promoting my product or business.

Even though both Renault and Kimi Räikkönen are former world champions they somehow don't fit in that profile.

However, it does give a completely new and cool dimension to my Formula 1 experience and after seeing Kimi driving today I'm sure we'll see some cool races. It's good to have you back Kimi!

BTW, on the news was the message that Microsoft is sponsoring Formula 1. I heard nobody mentioning Dynamics. Guess that means we have a long way to go.

Sneak Preview | Object Designer in NAV 7

Marq — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:50:00 GMT

With a big thank you to Michael Nielsen of MSFT we have a sneak preview of the NAV7 Object Designer.

http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=51601&p=249972#p249972

Coming Up | Directions EMEA 2012 | Be There

Marq — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:30:00 GMT

January 2012 is half finished and most of us should have successfuly guided those customers that still want to go live on the magic January 1st into production with Dynamics NAV.

So time to announce that Directions EMEA is around the corner! At the moment of writing this blog, it's 70 days away. Time flies.

This year it seems that flying is unavoidable for me, as some of you know I Always drive to these events if I can. But this is to far for that.

This meaning ROME! An amazing place to expecience the birth of Dynamics NAV 7! Both from a technological and functional perspective the richest and most advanced version of NAV ever.

It seems that the comittee has again put me on the speakerslist without asking me, so be prepared to see and hear me there yet for another year.

In holland we have a saying that you are a part of the inventory, guess this is the case here.

Anyway that leaves me with telling you the dates:

It's April 25th to 27th. But notice that the trainings start early on the 25th so you might want to arrive on the 24th.

See you there!

Registration Link!

Terminal Server | Multi Country and Codepages

Marq — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:20:00 GMT

This blog is as much as informative and subject to change/discussion.

At one of my Dutch customers we are implementing two subsidiaries in Lithuania. These are simple offices that do accounting, sales and purchases with pretty much standard NAV which also the HQ does.

Since the LT localisation is not very exiting we decided to have them all in one database. I know this is not officially best practice from a technical and upgrade point of view, but as most of you know the advantages of having it in one system weigh more than the disadvantages.

The implementation goes very well as for training, setup etc. But today we ran into an unexpected issue. I think...

I already realised that we would run into the codepage issue as described in my blog.

http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/mark_brummel/archive/2009/05/09/tip-5-multiple-country-databases-validate-codepage.aspx

I took this as a fact and disabled the flag, told the management and users what to expect. Everyone happy.

Until we went into the Terminal Server. We are running Terminal Server 2008 and for what we have found out (and I am not expert) we can only run TS in one codepage that is determined at startup. So we figured, what if we use the LT codepage? Would that effect Dutch users. Testing proved (we tought) that this would work as we don't have strange characters in NL and the LT ansi codepage has all dutch characters.

But then we got a call from order entry that tbe barcodes where not printing anymore. Investigation proved that the barcode font is also ANSI based and did not work on LT codepage.

Al and al I did not have a very good feeling about running NL on a LT codepage and we decided to create a new terminal server for the LT users since we have VMWare and a TS license is not that expensive.

Any feedback? Has anyone managed to setup TS with multiple codepages for different users?

Cheers

Strange Behaviour of Classic Reports in the RTC after hotfixes

Marq — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 09:48:00 GMT

This week I got an email from Thijs den Hartog that he was experiencing weird behaviouor of classic reports after doing dome updates of the binaries of Dynamics NAV.

Also this week I read an announcement on the NAV Teamblog that they introduced a new feature called Metadata versions since updating the binaries require a recompile of all objects.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nav/archive/2011/11/17/introducing-metadata-version-in-nav-2009-sp1-r2-hotfixes.aspx

Dit you think I was smart enough to link these two?

Eh, no...

But after another email from Jorrit Mertens that they found out that their solution was a recompile I did.

So this seems to me an important update for all RTC users.

Just a sidestep: At my RTC implementations I do not use classic reports anymore and since Microsoft reccomends not implementing hotfixes unless you explicitly eperience the problem that the hotfix describes I recommend both.

Always convert your reprorts to RDLC, it is really not that complicated once you get the hang of it. Its actually fun.
Never implement Hotfixes unless you really need them.

Thanks Jorrit and Thijs for allowing me to share this valuable information.

Enjoy your sundays.

/Mark

Managing Development (Part I)

Marq — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:42:00 GMT

With my previous post I unintentionally caused quite a stir between the partners who develop tools that allow us to manage our development, not just because my big mistake in thinking Mergetool was not yet updated to pages, which it was, but also in my firm opinion that metadata and tools should not be in a customer or development database.

So I believe that this deserves more attention, explanation and clarification.

Disclaimer

This post is solely my option on this subject. I have been involved in Dynamics NAV development since 1999 and been busy with managing this ever since. I’ve tried many ways and my current opinion is based on this experience.

As for the iFacto ReVision tool, you should know that Eric Wauters (Waldo) used me as a sounding board for their ideas, so it is not a surprise that this tool is based on my current opinion of how object management should be done. However I do not own any shares in this tool or the company, and I am not using the tool in my own projects.

Introduction

Both at Directions USA 2010 and NavTechDays 2011 I presented a session called “Tools and Tricks that make development easier and more organized”. In this session I spent a lot of time on how to manage objects. Reasons for this are both that many partners are struggling with this and doing it the wrong way. But when it comes to managing development there is much more than managing objects. Methodology and standards are a big part of this. No matter how good your objects are managed your development will be a mess if all your developers use their own standards.

This first post will be about managing your objects and is hopefully the start of a series, depending of the comments and reactions.

Other parts may be about methodologies like Waterfall & Scrum, Architecture, Standards and maybe even the CfMD label in this context. I would also like to write about how the object designer can be changed to accommodate our needs.

What does Object Management mean

Whenever you change an object in Microsoft Dynamics NAV it’s nice to document why you have made that change and if you develop a feature that requires you to change more than one object you want to know which objects are changed when you move this feature into another database. That is what Object Management means in a nutshell.

Object Management in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

The object designer does not allow you to do much with this information. There are four features you can use.

Modified Flag

Whenever you change or create an object in the Object Designer the modified field is set to Yes. It is considered best practice to disable this flag whenever you move objects out of the database into another system. Doing this the modified flag allows you to manage all changes.

Example

Mike does development for a company called Contoso. The database does not contain any unreleased changes so none of the objects have the modified flag set to “Yes” and there are no other developers in the database. Mike changes three objects for his development project. By filtering on the Modified flag he can easily see what he has done and which objects to export when he is finished. When Mike is finished he clears the Modified flag to “No”.

Limitations

As you can read in the example this method have many limitations. It only allows you to work on one issue at a time and requires you to export them before starting on a new change. Other than the export file there is no history of the change that is easy to see for others.

Version List

The Object table has a field called Version List. This is a text field that allows you to store 80 characters. The field is used by Microsoft and indicated the last version the object was changed and if it was changes for localization, also with a version number.

If used fully by Microsoft, the field allows us to add maybe 60 characters.

Example (I)

John has also been asked to make a change in the Contoso system. He works on the same database as Mike. This means they cannot use the Modified flag anymore. They agree to update the version list field with their initials so they can see who has modified which object. When they export the objects they remove their initials so the version list is clean.

Example (II)

Mike wants to keep track of changed objects per change request. He decides to assign numbers to each request and add this number to the version list.

Limitations

The first example requires both developers to manually populate the version list field. The second example will run into issues when the limit of 80 characters is reached.

Documentation Trigger

Each object in Microsoft Dynamics NAV allows you to write a book in the Documentation Trigger. This trigger is not used by Microsoft and ships blank with the product.

Each field in the Tables also has a Documentation property.

Example

John needs to fix an issue in one of the changes that Mike has done in the Contoso system. Because Mike always explains his change in the documentation trigger making it easier for John to find the place that Mike has modified.

Limitations

As with the Version List, using the Documentation trigger is not mandatory for developers making it easy to forget. Also finding a balance in the details of the change can make it difficult to read them. Solutions with a long history might have so much documentation that it’s no longer easy to find the information required.

Object Locking

Version 2009 R2 of Microsoft Dynamics NAV got shipped with a new feature Object Locking. This process can be done both manually and automatically and will update the Locked and Locked By field in the Object List.

Object Locking is mainly intended to prevent developers from working on the same objects and not to implement versioning. In fact, when used automatically the locked flag is already activated by opening the object and left that way even if the object is not changed and only looked at. This makes it difficult to use.

The Locked and Locked By fields are NOT exported when the object is moved to another database.

Object Versioning vs. Objects Release

Before we can proceed to solutions to more advanced Object Management it is important to talk about the difference between an object version and releasing objects.

Object Versions

Each time something changes to an object, it is a new version of the object that can be compared to the previous version, but from a change request perspective a specific version of an object is not interesting. A change request is a group of objects. This group will move from one database to another.

Release Versions

When we release in Microsoft Dynamics NAV we don’t release objects, we release a feature or a couple of features. This release only makes sense if all objects in the release work correctly with each other and the new feature works.

From a business perspective it is more interesting to version these features as packages than versioning the individual objects.

Basically this means we are versioning to entities. We’ll have different versions of an object and when a change request ships as a package this will have a version to.

Versioning Schema

If we put this theory in a schema the change request is the central object. The Change Request leads us to change one or more objects. When finished, one or more change requests will be released as a package, being a combination of changed objects allowing you to use the new feature in another system.

Overlap & Dependencies

When two or more change requests require a modification in the same object we cannot release them separately unless we develop them one-by-one. Therefore a release can and sometimes should contain multiple change requests that are dependent of each other.

Where to implement Object Management

Even if you can do everything in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, does not mean you should do everything in it. Why is that, you might ask. Isn’t the development database the most ideal place? The answer is “No” and I’ll explain why.

Production & Development databases

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV database contains a minimum amount of metadata. Each object has only one version and does not know about its past. Reason for this is simplicity which is a very important feature of the product.

In software development it is also best practice to remove additional metadata and go into production with a clean system. Microsoft Excel 2010 does not contain information to be compiled to go back to Excel 2000 or any version in between.

Development databases need to be refreshed from time to time. The data gets old, or even corrupt. If your metadata would be in the Development database and not in the Production database it becomes increasingly difficult to easily replace Development with a fresh copy of Production.

Development in a Production database

Also from time to time you’d want to develop in another database than your development database, for example making a quick page or report change in a production system. In a test system, after running conversions, you might want to make some minor changes without going back to development and release back to test. And large organizations may have multiple teams working on different parts in their own separate development databases.

Al these scenarios are not supported if your Database Management tool is bound to one database.

Managing you Object Management

If your Database Management Tool is inside your Development databases you’ll create a new task of managing the tool. When you start a new project you’ll start with the last version of the DevTool. But an older project might run an older copy of your tool.

Database Management Outside of Microsoft Dynamics NAV

A solution to this might be to manage your development with a tool that resides outside of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and has only one copy. This way, you won’t have to import management objects into each database, you won’t have to move metadata from one database to another and have one running version of the tool.

Does this mean the tool cannot be developed in Microsoft Dynamics NAV? Well unfortunately yes, since it requires a different kind of application that is able to reside inside your windows environment and “spy” for changes that happen in these systems.

Really? Isn’t there any other way? No, not unless Microsoft offers another way of managing objects.

Where do I store my changes

There can be several places to store your changes. It can be one of the well-known repository systems like Team Foundation Server, Visual SourceSafe or SubVersion. Problem with these repositories is that they don’t know Microsoft Dynamics NAV syntax.

And what about NAV as a repository

My wet dream is a combination of having an external tool that catches changes, saves the data in a repository, but the repository can also be a Microsoft Dynamics NAV database, as long as it is a database that stands alone from the project databases such as production, development etc.

This way you keep your Microsoft Dynamics NAV database nice and clean from external tools and take advantage of the possibilities of all the tools that are out these.

What are the next steps

Currently there are three big vendors on the market that deliver Development Tools for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Vendor	Tool Name	Free Version	Commercial
Idyn	Object Manager (Advanced)	√	√
iFacto	ReVision Source Control		√
MergeTool	MergeTool	√	√

Currently Idyn is by far market leader with their product, and it’s a great product that goes way beyond Object Management as described. It is completely developed inside Microsoft Dynamics NAV, stores data in the Development and Production database and last but not least, the code is scrabbled. Object Manager has a free version but the cool stuff is in the paid version.

ReVision is a tool that resides outside Microsoft Dynamics NAV and just scans changes from any database that is open and connects that to a repository. In my opinion that is exactly how it should be. However, ReVision does not have change request management and/or all the nice extra features that the Object Manager Advanced or MergeTool comes shipped with. And ReVision does not have a free version. However Change Requests are scheduled for the next version as are making releases of objects. Since ReVision is running inside Windows the tool can do other great things such as start the correct Client with a single mouseclick directly in the correct database and it has a great roll-back feature, although the latter is in my opinion always dangerous with Table definition changes.

MergeTool is has a different approach than Object Manager Advanced and ReVision. MergeTool does not “catch” the object changes but requires you to import them via .txt files making it more a repository than a Version Management Tool. Just like Object Manager, MergeTool also has tons of other small tools that make your life easier like a superb internal compare algorithm that can do automatic merges and renumber tools. And best of all, MergeTool is 100% free and OpenSource. Only if you are an end user doing your own development it is a commercial tool.

So what should I do

If there were to be a conclusion it would be that none of the current products match my requirements. But, there is a roadmap to success.

Path A

The first solution would be to extend Object Manager Advanced with a tool like ReVision that monitors the system for changes and stores this into the current structure of the application. This would make Object Manager Advanced the repository.

Path B

Second solution and maybe more logical from my point of view since they don´t compete is to add the MergeTool as a repository to ReVision. I’m not really sure if that is technically possible since I am not familiar with the requirements that are necessary.

What should Microsoft do

Let’s look at the subject from a different angle. If so many partners have challenges maintaining their solutions, should not Microsoft change something?

As an MVP and as part of the Partner Ready Software team I can tell that this has the attention of Microsoft. Recently the PRS team spent a day on the Microsoft Campus in Vedbæk (MDCC) where we had a chance to present our ideas based on the sessions we had in Antwerp and Orlando. Afterwards we had a discussion with the people who should be able to make decisions and with a guy called Per Rasmussen who is doing a Thesis that touches this subject. This lead to the conclusion and quote: “The core of the matter is exactly the same”.

Simplicity

One of the great things about Dynamics NAV is simplicity. Someone can go into NAV and start changing it if he or she has the proper rights to do so. Whatever Microsoft changes, this should never go away.

Layers vs. Namespaces

Sometimes I hear people talk about layers in objects. Dynamics AX supposed to have something like that where you can stack pieces of functionality on top of each other and therefore it’s a more professional product and supports multi country environments.

Personally I more like the idea of using Namespaces which is something Partner Ready Software came up with.

Namespaces can be pieces of functionality that belong together, like “W1”, “DE” or “NL” but also “ISV1”, ‘ISV2” etc. This would make the versioning list we use today more explicit since we could start doing versioning of Namespaces. It should be as easy to remove a Namespace as it should be to remove one, unless they are dependent of each other. Still I would not like to have more than one version of a Namespace in a database, all the rest should be in the repository.

Namespaces can also remove the need for object & field numbering other than maybe for user rights.

Object Trigger Changes

Even though the “backdoor” which is used by ReVision is supported in version “6” & “7” I would like this to be the “official” way of tracking object changes, but as a NAV developer I would like to have the possibility to create a tool like ReVision from within Dynamics NAV. Actually, writing this, my guess is you could if you use DotNet interop.

Repository

I would like Microsoft to give us a repository tool that we can build upon ourselves. Making it best practice to separate development metadata from customer databases.

Data Dictionary

In Microsoft Dynamics NAV we reuse a lot of terminology. Fields like Customer No. and Description are all over the place. Still it’s easy to make a typo and we need to translate the same captions over and over again. This could easily be solved by implementing a Data Dictionary that stores all the most commonly used captions and translations.

I will elaborate more about this and namespaces in the future on the Partner Ready Software wiki pages.

Other Tools

So what about the other tools? This blog post was intended to cover Object Management, my view on the subject and compare this to the current solutions that are available and Microsoft’s responsibility.

If you look at tools like MergeTool and Object Manager Advanced, you’ll see that they are much more than an Object Management tool. In my opinion this should be separated and partly improved by Microsoft.

Let’s make a short list of things that are obviously missing or should be easier in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Where Used

This is probably the single biggest issue that developers run into in their daily job. It has never been in the product although in some versions the menu option existed in the Object Designer even though I cannot remember the exact version.

Fortunately the MergeTool offers this for free, or you can use Notepad if you are familiar with the txt syntax of the object export like I am.

Security Setup

To setup security in Microsoft Dynamics NAV you must totally master all the Design Patterns and even memorize object numbers by heart. When developing a new function, security is part of the process and should be easier to transfer between databases, like is done in Object Manager Advanced.

It should also be possible if a user gets a permission error to have the option “request permission”. This should be as simple as the Notifications in the RTC for a system admin to say “allow” or “deny”.

Export Current Objects

Generally considered best practice and part of Object Managers deployment is the possibility of export the current status of objects before you import new objects. This should be a simple button on the “import objects” menu.

Advanced Client Monitor

Client Monitor is a great feature but the output is very hard to analyze. In all my workshops I try to tell people about the Advanced Client Monitor that was available in the Performance Troubleshooting guide for Navision 5.0. This should be part of the standard application rather than the current output.

Conclusion

Object Management is something that can be achieved in many different ways. Everyone should investigate their own strategy and analyze best practices. It also depends if you are Microsoft, and ISV, a VAR or an end user that does in-house development.

Looking at the success of the tool vendors Microsoft is clearly leaving a gap there. The good side of it is that it allows us to make our own choices to store all metadata in the customer database or to use a repository.

From my point of view there is no best-buy on the market today.

So what do I use myself? I have a very small tool I created myself with the help of Jorg Stryk that is in the development database to track changes. I only do this because that is the only thing I can do since I’m not a .Net developer. It has only four tables to store Tasks, Task Objects, Releases and Release Objects.

Everything else I do in the MergeTool which I use as a repository. Thank you Per Mogensen for making this great product.

I hope that one day my dream of a connection between ReVision and MergeTool happens in real life.

Enjoy, and hopefully for nobody any hard feelings…

Sources

The information in this post is based on research (yes, this time I did do that).

Nevertheless I might have made mistakes despite of all my efforts. If so, please let me know via the Contact option on this blog and don’t start your own advertisements. It will be moderated.

All the products have videos and most of them I watched. I encourage you to do the same and form your own opinion.

www.mergetool.com Video

http://idyn.nl/products/objectmanageradvanced.aspx Video

http://www.ifacto.be/en/revision Video

NAV "7" | The end of the Form era... (UPDATED!!)

Marq — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:37:00 GMT

Today, Todd Bergesson of Microsoft confirmed at NAVUG that the classic forms as we have known them since 1995 will be discontinued in NAV "7".

This quote is from MSDynamicsWorld.

The reason for this, Bergeson said, is twofold: First, SQL is the only server option for NAV 7, so when a user is upgrading to 2009, he needs to upgrade to SQL; and second, the Classic Client must be upgraded to the Role Tailored Client using the transformational tool in 2009, because the engine that runs the forms in previous versions will no longer exist.

"So, when you upgrade to 7, and everything's in forms, nothing will run," Bergeson said. "I can guarantee you, the forms aren't going to miraculously change and appear, because that's going to throw the development cycle out by another year. So, that engine is gone. Classic client is gone, so you just need to have that discussion now."

Entire article here

This means that NAV7 will not only ship without forms, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to run forms

So anyone who wants to use NAV 7, the RTC is the only option. This also means it is mandatory to go through 2009 to upgrade your forms to pages. This has two reasons.

1. The Transformation Tool is not shipped and/or updated for NAV "7"

This means that you would either have to run the old Transformation Tool but against what forms, this brings us to

2. The new funtionality is only in pages

So you cannot merge your forms with "7" forms and go to pages. You MUST merge your old forms with "6" forms, then goto "6" pages and then merge to "7" pages.

This is a mandatory path every upgrade must follow.

And this is old news, but it has never been official until now.

What are the other consequences...

From a development/partner perspective there are massive consequences, namely most partners have built their own development tools within NAV. And they won't work anymore. Let's have a look at the three most popular ones

1. Object Manager by Idyn.

Unless updated to pages this tool will not work anymore, and even then, it will be extremely hard to use since having a page based tool it requires all developers to have an RTC active on their development systeem. Which off course they should already, but still, it is more a hassle

2. MergeTool

This tool is already updated to pages (thank you Denster, I did not know that), so tool will still work , but the form versions can only be used in old versions.

3. ReVision

Here, there are no changes. Clearly this tool has been made with the vision that having a tool that resides within NAV does not have a long term future. ReVision is .Net based and uses an external repository. This tool should be a safe investment.

Exiting times...

Windows 8 Pre-Beta | One week testdrive

Marq — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:36:00 GMT

If you want to test with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 7 you need a x64 machine. Not to run the client, since that is still x86 but to run the service tier and SQL Server.

So when I got invited to Knowledge Transfer 3 as part of the TAP program I needed to make a decision since my system was three years old and back then it was still normal to install x86.

My laptop is only thee years old and was quite good when I bought it, its x64 with enough RAM and a fast CPU but I decided to upgrade the slowest part, the disk and have a Solid State Disk installed and make it dual boot.

I had Windows 7 x64 installed and decided to upgrade to Windows 8 pre beta since I could still boot my old Windows 7 x86. So here are my experiences after a week. Not from Dynamics NAV 7 but from Windows 8.

The system now boots in 4-6 seconds. I love that...

What does it look like

Tiles! That is what windows 8 looks like. Basicaly it is just a big Windows 7 phone. Your desktop is screaming for a touchscreen as soon as you first look at it.

It comes installed with a lot of programs that support the tiles since the UI is different from the older windows versions. All applications use the entire screen and there is no task bar that allows you to switch applications. I also have not found a way to close applications yet. ALT+F4 does not work and there is no [X] in the upper right corner. There is only the task manager that allows you to kill apps.

The tiles are your start menu, the classic start menu that came up from the left bottom corner is dead. When you press start you just get the tiles. Searching for applications is easy, you can just start typing and it will list up.

You can easiliy rearrange the apps by holding them with your mouse to another place. I have not yet found a way to change the icons. I guess all applications must be updated to have the large icons.

Classic Mode

As soon as you start a program that is not "Windows 8" ready you get redirected to a sort of second hand desktop that looks like the Windows 7 desktop but without some options. For example, here you also have no start menu. You do have a taskbar, which I still find handy.

What does work

Actually it is quite amazing, I have worked with it for a week at customers, Microsoft etc. You can register in a domain, all network options work so you can basically just do your thing. Or at least, I can.

What does not work

I tried using the RDP "tile" but that seems very bugy. I spend a lot of time on remote desktops and this one just kicks you off every not and then. Fortunately the old "mstsc" still works and is table.

Also, I cannot login to my blog. I am typing this entry from my server via RDP. I only managed to login once, but after that no more succes.

Typing in text on forums and facebook is also a drama. It starts a spelling checker and after a few words it is just dead slow. My workaround is typing in Notepad (yes still there) and copy/paste that

What do I think

I like the idea of moving to touch screens and I can see a business value in that, but without the touchscreen it does not make much sense to have tiles. Most people in a business operation only use few applications that they have open all day. Having sayd this it is harder to switch between applications, you can only use alt+tab. Alt+Start is dead.

What would make sense is to use the tiles for part of the application. For example put some ques on a tile rather than on the role center or have a tile with emails or a graph. That way you can use your desktop as a realtime overwiew, basically like sharepoint was meant to be when I first saw it over 10 years ago.

My recommendation

Is "try this at home". But don't use it for business yet. Even if it would be released like this, it does not add any value unless Microsoft finds a way to use the tiles from a business perspective

TIP #34 | RDLC Row background itteration

Marq — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:41:00 GMT

As I described in my previous post, we will get report design guidlines.

One of these guidlines is to use itterated background changes in list reports. This looks realy cool, just like listplaces in the RTC. But how do you implement this. Wel, it is extremely easy.

BackgroundColor

This is a property that every contol has in RDLC and you can populate it with a name or hexnumber representing the color

Expressions

In most RDLC properties you can write expressions. This is a very easy language which is unfortunately different from C/AL. For example the IF/ELSE statement is IIF(Condition, Yesresult, Noresult). But still easy to learn.

Built In Report variables

One thing I advice everyone to learn is that RDLC has built in variables that you can use, similar to CurrReport.PAGENO in the classic designer, but TONS and TONS more.

One of them is RowNumber.

If you combine this you can create an expression like this:

=iif(RowNumber(

Nothing) mod 2, "LightGrey", "White")

Result

The result is making reports easily look like this:

Report changes in NAV 7 | Some preparations

Marq — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:06:00 GMT

Most changes in Dynamics NAV 7 are under NDA so we (mvp's) cannot blog about them, but fortunately we can do some sneak peaks of what is ahead and how you can prepare.

This post has a disclaimer and all contents is "as is", no promisses and everything is subject to change.

I already posted some of these back in May this year, but this post contains some more hands on tips to use today.

Report look and feel

The reports in NAV7 should have the look and feel as described in the general Dynamics Reporting guidelines. My advice is to start using these guidelines if you create new reports in NAV6. You should be able to easily upgrade them to NAV7 when it comes out.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg853322.aspx

RDLC2008

Although RDL and RDLC are closely releated they have differences. Not only is RDLC a subset ot RDL, also both syntaxes are released and maintained by different product teams. The SQL Server team is responsible for releasing and updating RDL. Then the Visual Studio team picks it up and in its next release would create the RDLC version of the latest RDL.

Currently we are on RDL2010 and RDLC2008. This does not mean NAV7 wil ship with RDLC2008, maybe we can get RDLC2010 if VS2011 ships soon enough and the NAV people can implement this. (Hope you read this Claus.

What we can do is start learning the RDLC2008 possibilities and look as VS2010.

So what are the changes... They are difficult to find on the internet since most blogposts are about RDL rather than RDLC which clutters the information that we can use and not.

One of them is the new Tablix control, that allows multiple dataitmes to be iterated, for example Inventory Qty. and Value per period. This should allow us to do things with reports that we could not do with classic matrix forms.

Others are gauges and chart coloring that allow us to create nicer looking charts and KPI's.

Headers and Footers

THE single biggest and most important improvement for reports in RDLC2008 is that it allows dataitmes in headers and footers. That enables us to discontinue the workaround we had to do in RDLC2005 to create Document reports.

Productivity features

Something else that I noticed using RDLC2008 are the productivity features. Just tons of small things that make live easier like auto allignment.

START TODAY!!!

NAV7 will not support classic reports! It is very important to get up to speed on RDLC. Even though RDLC2008 makes our lives much easier I do NOT recommend waiting for this release. It is much easier to understand RDLC2008 if you are already on RDLC2005 and RDLC2005 reports will automagically upgrade to 2008.

Review | Professional Reporting

Marq — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:38:00 GMT

Just before I traveled to Denmark for KT3 my copy of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009: Professional Reporting arrived. Packt asked me to review it.

As an author I think reviews are very important feedback for the writers so I decided to try and write more than, "mandatory reading" or "must have".

So here it goes.

First thing I should mention is that Packt asked me to write this book right after I finished my own. I decided to say no because I was in the middle of moving houses and honestly glad that I finised my first book. Still it is good to see someone has taken on the job and see the end result.

Outline

The book contains seven chapters and 325 pages which is way more than the Administrating book but almost half the size of David Studebakers Programming book which also contains a chapter about reporting. More about that later.

The chapters in the book are:

Charts and Dimensions
Creating a Report in the Classic Client
Creating Role Tailored Client Reports
Visialisation Methods
Developing Specific Reports
Other Reporting and Business Intelligence Tools
View of the Future

Looking at this outline already clarifies that this book contains more than reports in classal "paper" approach. The first chapter does not even touch reports but explains RTC Charts and how to use dimensions to create reports using the built in BI tools in NAV.

Charts and Dimensions

The book starts by explaining what you can do in NAV without creating report objects in the system. Altough it feels awkward to start with this it is important to understand the built in capabilities in NAV that allow you to analyse your data without creating new objects.

Creating a Report in the Classic Client

If you are an experienced NAV user/developer in older versions than this is probably a chapter that does not contain many new things, but still it is important to have in a book that covers the complete reporting process. The contents of this chapter is basically identical to what already is in David Studebakers book and explains the basic report design process.

Creating Role Tailored Client Reports

For me personaly, this is where the book is starting to be interesting, the new report stack in NAV 2009. It contains a good explaination of RDL vs RDLC which is important to understand. This chapter does a much better job in explaining the VS part of report design than the Programming book but there is still a lot of overlap.

Visialisation Methods

RDLC gives us the possibilities all NAV customers have been asking for a long time: formatting, collors graphs etc. That is what this chapter is about. There are really good explanations and examples of formatting and conditional formatting and using the different VS controls like lists and matrixes. It also explains charts, images, linking reports etc.

Developing Specific Reports

When you think you know all about reporting in NAV, you still should read this chapters. It's basically a compilation of tips and tricks for report design.

Other Reporting and Business Intelligence Tools

When Packt asked me to write this book, the first thing that came in my mind was how can you create a book on just reporting. This chapter and chapter 1 confirm this tought. Chapter 6 is like 1 not about NAV reports but explains other ways to get your data out of NAV and do reporting with for example RDLC or Excel. You can argue if this should be in this book and where to start and stop. Still it has good contents and should get you started with these kind of reporting tools altough it is not complete.

A View of the Future

This chapter reveals a little of what we might see in future releases of NAV and SQL Server. Easier and more advanced reporting is one of the big deliveries in NAV7. Part of that delivery will be because of VS2010 and I urge everyone in NAV reporting to look at that version, since it is already available and should clarify a lot of what is there to come for us.

Overall thoughts

My overall conclusion is that the book is definately a must have and must read for all who want to do NAV reporting. The big disclaimer of this review is that I am not an average NAV guy. 95% of the contents of the book is not new for me so I cannot give a good indication if things are complete enough or need more clarification.

The recommendation to the author would be to add another 100 or 150 pages in the next copy to include more examples and detailed how to's. My general feeling is that this book will be purchased by end users a lot and for this audience it would help to have more deep dive contents.

Directions USA 2011 | Facing a 12 Month NDA Period

Marq — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:15:00 GMT

It's always difficult to blog about something when you're not the first. After reading Alex' and Erics blog about their Directions USA experience I figured I needed at least a catchy title to make you start reading.

For me, directions this year was fantastic. It was my first Lustum having only missed the first event and the one that was scheduled when my youngest daughter was born. In these five years I've met a lot of people I now call friends and somehow ended up on the speaker list. This year with two presentations and a chalk talk.

What I also experienced in this period is an event moving from driven by partners to a Microsoft event. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, it's just different.

Remember that in 2006 we were moving to what we now know as the RTC. It was an exiting experience. We were also in the "SQL is Bad" era where everyone was desperately looking for answers. I remember the shock everyone that waved through the room when someone showed generated C# code from C/AL and told that all object had to be recompiled in order for changes to have effect. Directions started out as an event where partners shouted at Microsoft and look where we are today.

Things change, things have changed and things will always change. Personally I think it's great that Microsoft is sharing NAV 7 with this channel, even though it is under NDA. As a MVP I know what it is to be under NDA and believe you me, I have learned it the hard way. One of the things I have learned about the NDA is that if you cannot say things directly you can use politically correct sentences. For example, I can say that I was happy that they show this "compile all" story at Directions and what happened after that.

So does that settle us with the way Directions is now? Hmmm, tough one. I think we have to. Read the blogs and what has been published. We are going to the cloud! Do you understand what that means? I don't think so. When I started with Navision 1.x it was an easy to understand product that was easy to install and deliver. We had a partner ecosystem that grew like crazy. The cloud can give that back to us if we use it.

The way I see the cloud is the ultimate way to deliver applications in a simple way. Navision like an app. You can already see this happening in Kroatia with the Stratus product. Here T-Mobile is offering Dynamics NAV in the cloud. Imagine T-Mobile as a sponsor of Directions.

No, Directions has changed, and will change, but we won't go back to 2006. We did a journey in the last five years moving from "Navision 5.0" to "Dynamics NAV 7".

That brings me back to this event. For many people, especially in the US, this was their Dynamics NAV 7 event, even tough the release is still one year away. And for me, NAV7 is exactly as Alex has described it, the version that makes NAV6 complete. Everything that was "difficult" in NAV6 is brought back to "simplicity" in NAV7 and beyond.

If we look at the application roadmap there are tons of new application features making this the first NAV release in years that is not just a technical release but really adds business value.

This basically concludes all I can say about Dynamics NAV 7, and is all I want to say about Directions, exept that I wanted to support Waldo's suggestion to have Microsoft talk about the future and the partners about today. And about Alex' comment about European speakers I can only suggest him to step up and face the crowd. Sounds to me he is voluntering to present next year.

So what about the sessions. There were tons of sessions that were not under NDA and I did manage to catch some of those.

The first session I went to was Role Tailoring by Niels Eric Hansen. He broke down the "Susan" role center into small pieces and explained what the real idea behind the RTC is. His view was great and I would love to hear more salespeople explain it like this.

After this I went to the Chalk Talk about Performance. Man, I love these Chalk Talks since they give you the opportunity to participate in the discussion. Ok, ok, I admit... at some point I had hijacked this Chalk Talk. Not because I meant to but because I love the subject to death, even tough it is not core business anymore. Truthfully I was a little surprised by some of the topics that were discussed. I was under the assumption that most of the performance issues are solved by Microsoft now and customers should not experience those issues anymore that are "unsolvable" by their partner. Guess I was wrong. Anyway, I think the CT was great and I hope that I pointed a few people in the right direction.

Then, after lunch, there was the classic "Ask the Experts" session. Now this was a real bummer. It used to be the real exiting session where Microsoft used to be beaten up by partners who asked good and not so good questions about the product. This year: nothing! really amazing. The two things I remember before I walked out for a meeting was a good question about security about which I want to write another blogpost. The other one was someone asking why Microsoft is not investing to enable them to compete with Epicore. This is something I am sick of listening to. Dynamics NAV can EASILY compete with Epicore and any other product. The truth is though that some features are not provided by Microsoft but by a ISV or VAR solution and/or customisations. So what? This is what NAV is all about, Microsoft delivering the spine and the ISV/VAR delivering the details. That's the story of their success. I don't ever want to hear someone mention Epicore again at Directions.

The reason I walked out of the ATE session was a meeting with Kirk Goodwin about a product called Mendix. Kirk looked at our PRS presentation Gary, Waldo and I did in Antwerp and tought we should look at that product, so we did. The cool thing about this product was that it separated the Business Case from the code which is exacly what we want to do with PRS. Thanks Kirk for showing us this product and giving us new ideas.

Then it was time for my session. Tips and Tricks. I did these presentations the last two years at Directions EMEA and decided to combine information from these two presentations and added something from Antwerp. WRONG! Not that there was anything wrong with the presentation, no, I only got positive feedback and lots of it. I ran out of time. Damn. Good news is that I have something left for next year. ;-)

This blog post is getting long, but don't worry, I did not get to see a lot of other sessions, or at least that were not under NDA.

Friday morning Gary, Waldo and I started preparing our PRS session. Not that we were not prepared, but there is always this last fine-tuning thing. Fortunately Waldo was feeling better. Did I mention I was in his Hotel room the entire Thursday? Imagine what he was doing there...

After this Waldo did his presentation about Webservices. As always he did a great job, I specially liked his tip about wrapping a webserice in a .Net interop DLL and consume it. I did not know this and it opens many doors. The second part about integrating with the webshop was going to fast for me to understand detailed enough to talk about.

Then after lunch we had our PRS sessions. First the presentation and then the Chalk Talk. Presentation went fine I guess but the CT was great! We discussed for a full two hours how to start executing. And this is what I am really exiting about. We have created awareness and will continue doing so for the next year, but meanwhile we'll start processing all the feedback into an execution plan to make all our NAV lives easier and more fun! Keep a close eye on our website!

This basically conluded my official stay at Directions. After our presentations Gary, Waldo and I went to Hooters to celebrate. This was an amazing place to visit from a european perspective seeing kids eat at a place that uses uncommon marketing to attract guys. Weird...

Friday evening there was the party, and not that it was not a great party, it was a wrong one. The C/Siders were missing and it was difficult to talk to anyone. This made me feel nostalgic to Austin Texas where we had a bbq outside with the c/sides play at the banks of the colorado river.

Saturday it was NAV7 day. I first went to see Clausl's (Claus Lundstom) session about reporting. Gain, without revealing NDA stuff, they addresses all the issues they have now and since a lot of the improvements are done in VS I might actually be able to do some blogging about this since this has already been released.

After this session Waldo and I did some shopping for the kids at the largest Toys'R us that I've ever seen. I also stayed Sunday when I had planned to do some work for customers but it actually seemed that there were so many folks left that Sunday also was a great networking day where I had a lot of good talks with some folks and killed some time at the mall with Bardur Knudsen.

I you are still reading this, thanks for your patience and being interested in my toughts. I would love to hear your opionons.

Cheers,

Mark Brummel, your Directions reporter

Tip #33 | Smart Debugging

Marq — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:33:00 GMT

One of the "Real life" tips I showed at NavTechDays is how to use the classic debugger smartly.

What I see people do many times is turn on the debugger with Breakpoints on Triggers

This means that the debug process wil break on each trigger it finds, meaning form & table triggers, functions and objects.

Even if you step through this process with F5, debugging a posting process like Sales wil take forever as there are hundreds of triggers that you will pass.

So what is the alternative.

The alternative is to place your own Breakpoints; this can be done in two ways

1. Via the Object Desiger

If your license allows you to edit C/AL code you can use this icon to go to the code of each object.

If you do this you'll enter the C/AL Editor that shows the code behind the application. But if you look closer there is a hidden "column" in this editor.

If you use the "Show Column" feature you'll see that this column even has a name: Breakpoint Column

If you select a line of code and hit F9 you'll see that a "Red Dot" appears in the column, meaning there is a breakpoint for the debugger.

Whenever you start the debugger now without the "Break on triggers" option, you'll see that the debugger will stop at this point, allowing you to go directly to the "suspected" piece of code.

But wait, there is more.

2. Via the debugger

You cannot just put breakpoints in the C/AL code via the object designer, you can also set them in the debugger directly, while debugging.

This allows you to set a new breakpoint somewhere down the line. This avoids the issue of stepping into all the functions and losing time.

Be Careful: This only works in the active object! You cannot step back into the previous object and add a breakpoint there.

They communicate!

The great feature about these breakpoints is that the debugger and code editor remember each others breakpoints. So if you place a breakpoint in the debugger, the red dot wil appear in the C/AL editor. This is done using the system table Breakpoint that is not visible in the Object Designer but is from the Report/Form/Page designer.

So remember using this smartly and save a lot of time in your debugging processes.

What does the open "red dot" mean?

Was one of the questions on NavTechDays, and I have to admin that I did not knew. But fortunately Lars Hammer of Microsoft was in the room and he knew. (And he should).

This allows you to temporarily disable a breakpoint without throwing it completely away. So you can quickly reenable it.

Stop Debugging

Another great feature about the debugger is the possibilty to roll-back a transaction that you are debugging. This is often useful when you have a scenario that requires a long time to setup and you don't want to backup and restore databases just to have the same scenario while finetuning your code.

Remember this when you need to fiddle with your code and you want to see the step-by-step results.

Call Stack

In Dynamics NAV you are likely to step into a loop of objects if you debug a complex process. Sometimes you hit an error somewhere in a tree and you want to see where this code was executed from. This is where you can use the Call Stack.

In this example, Codeunit 80 was called from codeunit 81 and before that from Form 42. You can double click on an object and see which line of code caused the execution of that object. This you can then use to stop the debug process, go to the object and place your breakpoint there. Remember: you cannot add breakpoints in the debugger in a tree of objects.

Dirty Reads

Sometimes you would like to see the data that your process creates without actually committing the transaction so you can roll-back and change your code. With the SQL Server option you can do that since NAV is using the ReadUncommitted isolation level. This allows users to see data in the database that is not committed yet.

NOTE: with the introduction of buffered inserts you might not see the inserted data since that is buffered to either a find command on that table or the commit of the transaction. If you do want to see the uncoommitted data and you know where to go, then put in a simple FIND statement on a copy variable of the record object.

That's al for today folks.

/Mark