Mark Brummel

WARNING!! Personal opinion here! Inspiration to write down idea’s are everywhere. Next week my youngest son has his birthday and we went out this evening with the train to the big city of Deventer to buy him (us) a Nintendo Switch. I’ve been loyal to Nintendo since the 1980ies and bought many of their consoles. I’m also loyal to Mario and have most of the games. When the Nintendo WII came out there was the option of buying NES games for 5 dollar and I bought Mario I and...

It seems that when my blog posts appear some people hold their breath. Don’t worry, that won’t be nessesairy this time. I am at the Vienna airport and just wanted to write some thoughts I have after the event. When I look at 2.500 people wondering around I don’t see a community. I see individuals. We call it a community because we share the love of a product but we need to move to the next level of community. Business Central Wave II is the first version of Navision without...

The “Where-Used” in Visual Studio Code is nice, but not always productive. Today I wanted to see where a field was used and came up with an alternative I wanted to share. ObsoleteState If you mark a field ObsoleteState::Pending the compile will throw warnings everywhere the field is used. This allows you to quickly use the error window to jump through the code and check whatever you want to check. When finished you set the obsolete state back.

Sometimes I can be a bit emotional when it comes to changes in the software product I work with on a daily bases. An example of that was my previous blog that I took offline in order to do some editing making it less about emotion and more about facts. The emotion is probably justified for a few reasons of which most the fact that Navision, NAV, Business Central (I stopped caring about the name) provides a living for me and my family but it’s more than that. Around our product there...

Now that the NDA on Business Central Wave II has been lifted and the DVD preview is released partners got time to look at the code Microsoft has refactored. The reactions vary from being marketing correct to more realistic . I have a strong opinion about what Microsoft did, and especially how they did it. First of all, I agree that it’s a great idea to split NAV up into modules and I also agree that the architecture has to be modernised in more than one way. But that does not mean...

This is something that’s long overdue, I wanted to write this before my summer vacation. My reason for holding back is that I want to share all the code for this project and this needs cleaning up. This is still not done and if you want the code you’ll have to contact me. Why am I still writing this? I am actually writhing this from the “International” airport of Cork Ireland where I spent the day with my friend Tim Grant. Tim and I go way back when we both worked...

The Business Central Community loves Git, but GitHub does not seem to even know we exist. It recognises our projects as perl projects and there is no suggestion for a .gitignore file. Why .gitignore? It’s generally considered best practice to use Git for managing uncompiled code, but not to store the result of a project, nor it’s dependencies. Also, settings that may vary from developer to developer are best not to be stored since doing to would continously lead to conflicts...

One of the most anoying things about writing AL code in Visual Studio Code is getting warnings that you cannot fix. Simply impossible. My “favorite” warning is this one For almost a decade it’s been possible to sort on flowfields from code and in reports and in most cases it works fine. On larger datasets it might require a covering index for performance. This warning is a joke because it suggests to add a flowfield to the key’s. Even if it were a normal field; in...

When developing extensions for Business Central you have a wide array of publishing options to choose from. My most used options when working on the ForNAV Customizable Report Pack are our Sandbox and Docker. Testing is best on the Sanxbox for two reasons. First because all the Azure Active Directory stuff actually returns something which is useful for licensing scenario’s. Second because you can easily share the result with the team since everyone is on the same Sandbox. Docker is...

Feedback is critical for Microsoft to improve Business Central and all of their other products. For this reason a preview is published of the upcomming release this fall. You can install this using Docker and I’ve been told a DVD will be made available soon. This release will be the biggest change since the introduction of the Three Tier model and Role Tailored Client and fits into the row completing the move to SQL Server and Dos to Windows. The move to AL is probably the smallest...