It’s the weekend after NAVTechDays and I rested from a busy week. Two days of pre-conference training and two days of talking at (a lot of) people mostly at the ForNAV booth but also at the booth of Meta UI, Continia, SQL Perform, Anveo, Prism and AL Ops. Design Patterns, once again Teaching the Design Patterns for AL the first time was fun, challenging and exhausting. It was fun because I got to talk about my passion once again, clean code and design patterns. Challenging because it...

Last Thursday I was at the QBShare event in Veghel, Holland. I’ve been attending these events ever since I joined ForNAV a few years back and since the audience is a bit different from my normal events (CEO vs. Developers) it took me a while to get to know people. No matter who you talk to at these events, all that they have on their minds is moving their IP to Business Central and most are in the middle of that project, some with my help. This is all great and it’s cool to see peoples growing...

It’s the week of NAVTechDays, the biggest Business Central Community event of the year and I thought it would be good to spend a few moments on the state of our community. Business Central is taking off. According to Microsoft there are more than 4000 paying tenants and the average number of users per tentant is 10+ which is the sweetspot where Navision used to be strong. I can also see it in my daily work, especially at ForNAV, where almost all of the support cases and pre-sales activities...

It’s friday afternoon and I’m goofing around a bit with the ForNAV AL Converter. I ran into something I want to share. AL seems to be more strickt in hardcoded dates than C/AL. Example Constant value '99993112D' is outside the range for a Date. The syntax for defining Date format is yyyymmddD, where D is a mandatory letter. For example, 20180325D, read as the 25th of March, 2018. This should be 99991231D but C/Side exports it using your regional settings. Fortunately...

By Steve Krisjanovs Below is a list of all COD10201 external functions and where I believe their event equivalents live in. There were three functions in the list below that had me stumped so a second set of eyes would be helpful. I do still believe that BC’s out of the box COD10201 should still have been modified by MS to indicate that all of these external functions are dead. The problem I encountered, was because nothing has changed with this codeunit from NAV to BC (the codeunit...

This article was triggered by a discussion on Yammer yesterday that I felt went a bit sideways. Business Central is a first class cloud citizen and it beats born in the cloud solutions easily but fact remains that it’s based on Navision, an ERP solution with a 30-some year legacy. Part of that legacy is a requirement for unique names in the objects, also in the cloud. Microsoft is working hard to remove this requirement hence it’s a temporary fix but the result is that every app on AppSource...

With the retirement of C/Side we have a challenge we did not have before regarding the license. We used to be able to see the license information from C/Side, upload the license and quickly create a new page that displays permissions. With Business Central this is no longer possible and we now need PowerShell to upload a license. On my GitHub you can find a repo you can clone to display the license information. Challenge I would also like to be able to change the license from...

If I get asked the same question twice I am already tempted to blog about it. This one exceeds this number and is long overdue. It looks like the whole world is now converting from C/AL to AL and running into challenges with that. Right now I am analysing several databases and one thing you need after elliminating low hanging fruit and removing errors that crash the compiler is to find common errors and count them. An Excel Pivot Table is perfect for that. Normally Visual Studio Code...

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...