Mark Brummel

A new version of Business Central is around the corner. The codename is BC16 or 2020 Wave I. Both are the same thing. I think it is safe to say that Business Central is a great succes. In the competing world of Cloud Business Solutions it is the most flexible product and the customer base is growing rapidly. Business Central has a fantastic user interface and the extensibility model is next to nothing else out there. Last week I was talking to a reseller of Business Central on the west...

I have not blogged as much as I want to recently. Not because there is nothing to write about, but because I am so insanely busy. However, today I ran into a question that required first Google and then Statical Prism to solve. UTC Calculation in Dynamics NAV (Or Business Central) This used to be cumbersome and required dirty tricks. Alternatively (and this is how I managed to solve it until today) you can setup a UTC service tier. But, with the help of Prism I found that Codeunit 358...

Yesterday at Microsoft I had two meetings, or goals. The first as you know was about our initiative to do a proof of concept to break the BaseApp into smaller extensions. The second meeting was about revamping the old Design Patterns we had for Dynamics NAV and bringing them up to speed for Business Central. For those of you who don’t know or to refresh memories; a few years ago there was a joint project between Microsoft and the community to document Design Patterns. The old patterns...

I love a nerdy title and I love learning about cool new smart stuff. But before you continue reading I want to say thanks to my colleagues at ForNAV, especially Michael Nielsen. Without him pushing me (again) to step out of my comfort zone this would not have been possible. Yesterday I visited the Microsoft office in Lyngby for the first time in a very, very long time to talk about our project to split up the base app. We also talked about something else, but that will be another blog. (Soon...

I often wonder how I find myself in situations like this. On my day off I find myself behind my desk doing something which is not my responsibility, nor am I getting paid to do it. If you say A, you also have to be willing to say B and C. This is what my parents told me when I was young so when I promissed Bugsy and Jesper to look into making the Business Central Base Application smaller I decided I may as well make it into a decent project. The Project The current status of the project...

Social media is fantastic and it can be used in many different ways. Where most people are mostly consumers others use it to ask questions. Some share knowledge and experience and gain loyal followers. This is pure awesomeness and mostly rewarded with the Microsoft MVP award for those who don’t give up. Drive Change Very few succeed in using social media to drive change. Those who do are known by many such as Elon Musk and Greta Thunberg. With Business Central we have a very little...

So to continue where we left off yesterday when I did a pull request on the Business Central System App project on GitHub. After my pull request someone at Microsoft did a code review in order to make sure quality standards are respected. Here are the details: I have to admit something. First of all, this is not actually my code. It came from my colleague Michael Nielsen. Secondly this blog post is a bit orchestrated since Jesper and I discussed in Antwerp at NAVTechDays how to promote...

With the recent Wave II release of Business Central we also got the first wave of Open Source in our beloved NAV/BC product. This means that rather than making customization for one specific customer or ISV you can now have this pushed back into the product and stay there forever. Today I did my first Pull Request and I wanted to share how I did that. What did I need? With reports, especially documents that go out, translations are key. In the next release of our ForNAV extension we...

Today I was a bit puzzled by getting this error message and how to fix it. error AS0054: The AppSourceCop configuration must specify one of the following properties: 'mandatorySuffix', 'mandatoryPrefix', or 'mandatoryAffixes' Yes, you can google the message but that only brings you to pages that describe the message, not how to fix it. It appears to be easy so I wanted to spare others the time.

This is a blog that I wanted to write for quite a while, but it’s only until last week or so that I think I’ve found what I like to call, a “best practice” or if you will, a “Design Pattern”. What is this all about? With the move from C/AL to Visual Studio Code we also moved to file based instead of stored in database. This means we also have to give these files a name and we have the option to organise the files into folders, or subdirectories if you are a born-in-dos generation. If you...