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About Erik P. Ernst

With my 28+ years in the Business Central/Navision industry, I am what others refer to as a "Dinosaur". Since I started with Navision in 1990, I've done almost everything in this industry, from end user, sales, training, support, project management, development, solution architecture and much more.

And I'm still doing it, because I love it.

I started the Navision Online User Group in 1995, now Dynamics 365 User Group and I have been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2004.

Here I mostly blog about the Dynamics 365 community, my experiences with Microsoft and/or the projects I'm working on, especially international projects. Or what every comes to on my mind or bothers me enough to wanna share with you.

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Blog - Monthly Archive List

Blog posts

Professional Business Central Developers?

Erik P. Ernst

If you, like me, have been part of the Navision community since 1990, then you have seen a lot. 10,000's of members of Dynamics User Group (prev. Navision.net/NOLUG) have come and gone again. Some stick around and with time becomes dinosaurs like me. But a lot of them, we only see 1-3 months, then never hear about again. And while I don't know the exact percentage, but my guess that a lot of them, are no longer working with NAV. At NAV TechDays 2018 two weeks ago, my friend David Singleton and…
- 2018-12-5
- Original post
- 957 views
- 0 comments
- 7 days ago
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Extension dependency in Business Central is not without challenges

Erik P. Ernst

One of the common recommendations from both Microsoft and all the experts in our community is to create smaller modular extensions designed with either a single purpose or with a single functional area. Within software development this is often called Modular Development/Architecture. This has several advantages, compared to create large (monolithic) extensions. The smaller the extension (the module) is the more likely it is that we can the sell the same extension to multiple customers. It also…
- 2018-11-26
- Original post
- 1350 views
- 10 comments
- 16 days ago
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Do you include test codeunits with your BC extensions?

Erik P. Ernst

Running Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud, means that we always have a system which is running the latest version. Microsoft will take care of the upgrades of both the standard code and any installed extensions. Before upgrading and upon any new build Business Central is being tested by running 10,000's of automated tests in the test toolkit. This test is done every time they build their code, and it checks that the functionality in BC works as it is designed to work. Besides the test…
- 2018-11-15
- Original post
- 1023 views
- 5 comments
- 27 days ago
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Why you should care about the name of C/AL controls, actions and entities?

Erik P. Ernst

Having worked for a while now with Visual Studio Code and AL, I have made a number of page extensions, where I really wanted to say something bad, to who every decided it was ok to name something Control1, Control2 etc! How exactly do you know which control to use when they are named like this: Luckily, they are not all as bad as the sales invoice page but would say that especially this page would have been great if they had been named a bit more carefully back in the days . At least to me…
- 2018-5-23
- Original post
- 1599 views
- 2 comments
- 6 months ago
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AL crash with Dynamics NAV 2018 CU5

Erik P. Ernst

Been out on a customer project last couple of weeks, so didn't have time to work on my own project. But this weekend is one of our many Spring holidays - Whitsun, which comes with Monday off. And the wife is working. So a little time to work on my AL project. Just needed to start by updating my development environment to the latest cumulative update for NAV 2018 - CU05. Using Docker that didn't take much time, neither did installing the new AL extension 0.12.20065 to Visual Studio Code. But…
- 2018-5-18
- Original post
- 2179 views
- 0 comments
- 6 months ago
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Global Implementations with Dynamics 365 Business Central

Erik P. Ernst

In my last post I wrote about how global NAV implementations used to be done . About the two different implementation models either a Template Core or One-Database Core. It took a bit longer to get this next “chapter” ready. Especially since a lot of the information has only been made available over the last week. Business Central was released this Monday, April 2nd. Localization's as Extension's The game changer was the release of NAV 2018 / Business Central. Extensions first came available…
- 2018-4-6
- Original post
- 5457 views
- 2 comments
- 8 months ago
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Top 10 Best Dynamics NAV Blogs 2018

Erik P. Ernst

Let me start announcing that the best of the NAV bloggers and blogs here on DUG, in the period April 1 st 2017 to March 31 st 2018 is Luc van Vugt and his blog Van Vugt's dynamiXs . And which day other than the release of Dynamics 365 Business Central , would be better to announce which of the NAV blogs here on Dynamics User Group, who are the best or most popular? In the words of Microsoft, then the Business Central release is the third generation of Navision. So while we have never before made…
- 2018-4-2
- Original post
- 5476 views
- 0 comments
- 8 months ago
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Finding an Easter Egg in the Extensions?

Erik P. Ernst

If was just taking a closer look at the different standard Extensions, coming with Dynamics 365 Business Central. They have become much more interesting, now that our Danish localization's are shipped as Extensions. When taking a look from inside the client, then we get this view: It's listing the Danish localization and other extensions. I then used PowerShell and use Get-NavContainerAppInfo to see the actual list of Extensions in my container. PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-NavContainerAppInfo…
- 2018-3-29
- Original post
- Business Central
- Extensions
- 4799 views
- 2 comments
- 8 months ago
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Global Implementations – how it has always been done (Part 1 of 3)

Erik P. Ernst

“The Way To Grow” used to be Navision’s slogan back in the 1990’ies. And that was how the system was sold, the ERP solution for successful and growing SMB’s (small to mid-sized businesses). Navision started to ship localized versions in the early 1990’ies, so it was a natural choice when these growing companies, expanded into to other countries. Instead of finding another suitable local ERP product, then Navision allowed them to use the same ERP system everywhere, as they used in their own headquarter…
- 2018-3-28
- Original post
- 3302 views
- 1 comments
- 8 months ago
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What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? And what not?

Erik P. Ernst

Yesterday 3/12/2018, MSDynamicsWorld leaked that the name of what we used to know as Dynamics 365 'Tenerife', would be Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central . Initially this was not to have been released until Thursday 3/15 at Directions ASIA in Bangkok, but the news spread fast. So fast that Microsoft's Alysa Taylor, the general manager for Business Apps and Strategy, officially announced the new name today . What is Dynamics 365 Business Central? It is everything what Dynamics 365 for…
- 2018-3-13
- Original post
- 5304 views
- 0 comments
- 9 months ago
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