Mark Brummel

At the airport of Copenhagen (CPH) eating my favorite burger. (Aamanns Burger). Then writing a blog. This is an awkward blog, a blog that was asked for by my colleague Jan when I spent a few days at our office. He asked if I could blog something about converting from C/AL to AL with the ForNAV converter based on the series of blogs by Freddy. ( https://freddysblog.com/tag/c-al-to-al/ ). Off course, at ForNAV, converting code is our bread and butter. But our converter from C/AL to AL is free...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the best and most customizable ERP that ever existed. There, you have it. For some people it’s hard to understand that in one blog I am trying to protect our ecosystem from loosing C/Side and in the next I am praising Business Central to be miles better than any other cloud ERP. The reason is honesty and reflection. If you don’t know NAV/Navision then Business Central is an ERP from Venus. The Web Client’s interface is next to nothing...

The move by Microsoft from C/Side to Visual Studio Code is a bit like Brexit. At first everybody thinks it is a great idea, until they realise the consequences. And then there is no way back. Why? Please let me explain… With C/Side we have issues, everybody knows that and these issues have to be solved. Issues like integration with source code management and other issues like… well… hmmmm. Visual Studio Code is the new kid on the block and it’s cool, it’s the most popular...

When working with Extensions I would not recommend working with Xliff files unless you design for AppSource. Otherwise CaptionML will work fine for Per-Tenant projects. Unfortunately for me, I am working right now on submitting an AppSource project and I need to evaluate if my translations are complete. As I explained at my presentation in Antwerp at NAVTechDays we continue to code in C/Side and then convert to Extensions and submit to AppSource. Therefor I don’t have the nightmare problem...

Let’s start diving into working with Extensions in Real Life. I have a lot to blog about and at first I thought I would blog about a very small extension but I’m sure you’ve all seen that. Let’s start big! At NAVTechDays I showed you the extension I created with the ForNAV converter that resulted in 2149 files which compiles and executes. I made the extension work on Business Central OnPrem, installed on my local box with the RTM version. What is the Build Time? It must be...

A little over a week ago I attended the Dutch Dynamics Community again, for the first time in a while. It was good to catch up and exchange news with peers in my network. “You’ve been quiet Mark!” is what I’ve been told a few times and that’s true. For some time I try to be quiet and focus on things that are more personal like being a dad of five now and trying to manage the project of fixing up my Land Rover Defender. It’s not a secret that for quite a while I was in...

Red and Bundle As you know we have been happily developing extensions for a while now. Every once in a while I blog about some stuff I found out recently but it is mostly smooth sailing at the moment. Today I was stumped though. For some reason my symbols were not loading. I make it a point to always develop extensions on a standard NAV2018 database (our current version, move to BC on prem is planned but not yet started) but sometimes I need to add functions or parameters that have been requested...

Today I wanted to extend a Role Center with a Page Extension and I noticed Microsoft has updated terminology. HomeItems = Embedding To add a list to the Home Items you must use Embedding. Other changes: Related Information = Navigation New = Creation. The Result in the Windows Client is the normal behavior with grouping the Cue from the Activities which in this case was also created using a Table Extension and a Page Extension. Great Job guys!

In software we’ve invented all kinds of terminology to make it sound as if removing a feature is great. Terms like sunsetting and retirement give you a great feeling. Who does not love to see the sun go down with a beer and a loved one. In reality it means that software that once was is no longer and we’ve had plenty of that in our beloved Navision product, now referred to as Business Central. FOB is an abbreviation of Financials Object, just like FLF is short for Financials License File...

Today I had a small talk with my brother about generating custom symbols from C/Side and how to manage that. Here is how I did it. At the company I work for we have a DTAP environment and we (normally) only code in Development. Fobs and Extensions are moved from Development to Test, Acceptance and Production. The quesion is how to control your symbols and move them together with each iteration. Surely you can generate symbols in your production database but that might not be super smart. Alternatively...