think about IT

Developer Preview – March Update

I’m very exited to attend Directions Asia this year.

It’s my first Directions Asia and also my first time in Thailand and it promises to be an amazing experience…

If you’re interested please join me in one (or more) of these sessions:

• Source code management simplified
  Date: Thursday, March 15, 2018 | From: 11:30:00 to 12:20:00 | Room: GALAXY2
• Dynamics 365 “Tenerife”, Saasification tools/Customer journey (Hands-on workshop)
  Date: Thursday, March 15, 2018 | From: 13:10:00 to 15:00:00 | Room: WIND
• Dynamics 365 “Tenerife”, Power Apps & Microsoft Flow Integration (Hands-on workshop)
  Date: Friday, March 16, 2018 | From: 10:00:00 to 11:50:00 | Room: WIND
• Bring Your Dynamics NAV & Dynamics 365 “Tenerife” Data to Life with Power BI
  Date: Friday, March 16, 2018 | From: 13:40:00 to 15:30:00 | Room: SKY

So, if you would like to know the answer to:

• What are the latest developments in the Microsoft Dynamics product family?
• What are the Microsoft plans for product availability in Asia-Pacific countries?
• How to use the momentum of the cloud-based revolution?
• How to increase your customer engagement in Asia?
• How can you reinvent your business to increase your profitability and market reach as an ISV and CSP?

then have a look at the session list here and…

The latest cumulative updates for Dynamics NAV 2015 (CU 41), Dynamics NAV 2016 (CU 29), Dynamics NAV 2017 (CU 16), and Dynamics NAV 2018 (CU 03) introduce the DataClassification property on tables and fields.
This property lets you tag table and field data with one of the classifications described in the next section.

Classifying Data in Dynamics NAV

Several of our most popular connectors are generally available, including SAP HANA. Bookmarking is also now generally available, which means you can start creating bookmarks from scratch in the Power BI Service. We are also previewing a powerful feature, report page tooltips, that lets you use visuals in your own custom designed tooltips.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-march-2018-feature-summary/

Here’s the complete list of March updates:

Reporting

• Report page tooltips (preview)
• Bookmarking is now generally available
• Display units and precision control for table & matrix columns
• Turn off the visual header in reading mode for a report
• Improved default visual placement

Custom visuals

• Mapbox
• User List by CloudScope
• Timeline by CloudScope
• KPI Chart by Akvelon
• R DataTable
• Outliers Detection
• Data Insights by MAQ Software
• Dumbbell Chart by MAQ Software
• Clustering using OPTICS by MAQ Software

Data connectivity

• SAP HANA connector enhancements
  • DirectQuery multidimensional support is now generally available
  • SSL certificate validation support
• SAP BW DirectQuery is now generally available
• Azure Analysis Services connector is now generally available

Other

• Improved error reporting
• View previous errors you’ve encountered

For a summary of the major updates, you can watch the following video:

I’m not a VSCode expert and there are probably better ways to do this, but I sometimes get a question: Is there an easier way to design an RDL report from within VSCode?

Well yes there is. You can create a Task to do it.

Open a Project in VSCode and goto your Tasks:

Here you can add a new task, like for example this one:

Of course you need to have Report Builder installed on your machine.

Then simply open an RDL report file and run your task OpenWithReportBuilder: (image takes some time to load)

I know, there are probably much better ways to do this, I’m not a VSCode export, but I thought why not share this quick tip…

More info on creating tasks is available here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/tasks#vscode

Similarly you can also add another task: OpenWithWord for the Word layouts: