Aphorisms about Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Last week was all about Visual Studio code. This time at Microsoft in Kista, North of Stockholm. Two days of Developing solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 and Business Central in Visual Studio code. The delegates consisted of a mix between Swedish partners, a Polish partner and internal Microsoft employees. Thank you to Anders Fuch for inviting me.

Three days of Visual Studio Code workshop in Stockholm, covering most aspects Visual Studio Code extensions for Dynamics NAV 2018 and Dynamics 365 Business Central. I think we got around most by covering: The Visual Studio Code Editor Native Github integration Using Snippets Creating Snippets Converting existing objects to AL And of course, creating objects: New Tables Extending existing tables, including which properties can be changed and where to add code to triggers…

The task After the Dynamics NAV 2018 CU2 release, I found it safe to upgrade my own Dynamics NAV 2016 solution up to Dynamics NAV 2018. But not only that, ALL changed objects should be transferred to extensions. My system is a small solution and it started in NAV 4.0. On every upgrade process, I have tried to kill all the changes in the system and to start all over, in order to utilize as much of the new standard functionality as possible. The upgrade process has been through a number…

Converting from C/AL to AL can be a bit of a hassle: First you need to open den Development Environment Then filter the objects that needs converting Export the objects to a txt file in a folder Then Run the Txt2AL.exe Lastly import them in the workspace So, I thought: Why cannot I do that directly from VS Code with PowerShell? Searching the Internet, it seems that a lot of other people have struggled with the same issue so I decided to compile a PowerShell script that can be…

In the version 2.0 extensions of Dynamics NAV, there has been an insignificant flaw [H] When reinstalling an extension that contains new tables or new fields in existing tables. The new data were deleted. With the Dynamics NAV 2018 CU2 release, that has been corrected. In order to test that, I have created a simple extension adding an extra table to Dynamics NAV: ShoeSize . Apart from that, I have added a new field to the Customer table and Card page: “Shoe Size Code” . The workspace…

At my latest Development course, we went through the report designer in Visual Studio, and I realized that not everyone knows the little tricks that can make development much easier: Don’t close Visual Studio Closing Visual studio every time the report is tested, is wasting a lot of time. Visual Studio takes a long time to start and keeping it open all the time you save the time opening it again and again. Just save the layout with Ctrl+S, switch to the Development Environment and save the…

Thanks to the comment James Crowter added to my last mail, ExtensionDetails is now available as an App. Adding one line to the app.json file, now it is possible to access the NavApp tables from the code. So, download the package from: http://ba-consult.dk/downloads/ExtensionDetails.zip Copy the two files: - InstallExtensionsDetails.ps1 - Peik Bech-Andersen_Extension Details_1.0.0.0.app to the c:\temp folder. Start PowerShell ISE (Or Visual Studio Code with the PowerShell extension…

Developing extensions in Dynamics NAV, it is possible to add two extensions that are adding the same field numbers to a solution. No warnings are given, and it is not possible to get an overview of which object numbers or field numbers the other extensions are adding. Let’s try an example: Now I publish and install the extension together with a page extension: In the Extension Management, it looks like this: Nothing new about that. Now, let’s try to install another extension…

Trying to create a new report in Dynamics NAV 2018, I got an error opening the layout. Being lazy as I am, I just switched to Report Builder instead of installing the new Visual Studio 2017. Big was my surprise. The layout was changed and wizards have been added for Tables, Matrixes and Lists. The table wizard first lets you select the dataset, then the New Table Wizard appears: Then Clicking Next, giving this: Ending up with this: Does anybody remember the classic report designer…

As I mentioned in my last blog post about the Developers Preview of November, a number of new events showed up in codeunit 80. Therefore, when I got the new CTP version of “Tenerife”, I sat down and made a function to make statistics on the new events. The result is an Excel sheet with a list of all business- and integration events in the versions NAV2016, NAV2017 and NAV2018 (“Tenerife”) and some statistics. The ExcelSheet is available for download here: http://ba-consult.dk/downloads…