All around NAV dev and test
Don't believe you can? Have a look at this picture story ...
For ages Help has been the laughingstock of NAV. Many where evading the creation of it, even more were mocking about the content. For various reasons.
With NAV 2009 MS has picked up this gauntlet in various ways: creating better and more valuable content, putting it online, providing us with easier to use tools, not in the least the help server that was released last year. Now with the release of NAV 2015 the next version of standard help has been put online. But it appears that it's still showing up in search queries as dominant as it used to be for previous versions.
If you now do a search for NAV ShowMandory the msdn topic on ShowMandatory will only show as last entry on the first page (and guess what's the top 3 shown?). But ... it is improving. The search results were even worse some weeks ago.
Searching for NAV AccessByPermission will not even yield an msdn result! Not even on msdn itself.
Informing myself on this with one of my former MS colleagues I found I surely was not the only one experiencing this and that the issue has been escalated to the msdn team.
Let's hope it improves the coming weeks.
Digging myself into the new features in NAV 2015 I was referencing the Help and found myself looking at default page. My first thought was: Isn't there any help for this field?
So I returned to the page and selected the upper left dropdown arrow (forgotten the term for it), Help, Microsoft Dynamkics NAV Help to see if there wasn't any help for the page. Nope. Same topic shown.
Now looking a bit more closely I saw I wasn't looking at 2015 help at all.
Didn't I install the NAV 2015 Help Server?
Well, apparently I had and it was running also.
But ... it was running on the same port as the NAV 2013 R2 Help Server: 49000. My recent installation of both NAV 2013 R2 and NAV 2015 came to mind. I had set different ports for the service tier, but had totally neglected the Help Server and thus had both set on the same port. (Note that there as a useful post on this by my fellow MVP Saurav Dhyani.)
Piece of cake to change the port, I thought. Well, now looking in retrospect, it is, but it took me some while before I got it running and even spammed one of my former MS colleagues with it. Once more my apology for that.
I guess you figured out that I knew the Help Server as an IIS service. But not being a regular user of the IIS Manager, it's like "wow, there is a lot to configure". Surely if you only look at the middle pane (Feature View) and start browsing around there. Don't, I can tell you now.
Have a look at the right pane and click on Bindings .... Now writing this I can't recall anymore how I got to click on that; nevertheless, that's where to go.
I added a binding for port 48000, deleted the one for 49000 (and left that to the Help Server for NAV 2013 R2) and (re)started the service.
Time to return to NAV 2015 and ... No, no, not yet. As the referencing of the help is handled by the service tier there another thing to do.
Stop service, change the Help Server Port to the right one, i.e. 48000 in our case, and restart the service.
Back to my NAV 2015 windows client and click F1 again.
.......... Shooot. Should have thought of this. At least should have better read Saurav's post.
There is a third part in this: the user settings the be found in ClientUserSettings.config which typically resides in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\80.
Change 49000 to 48000, save, restart my NAV 2015 windows client, and click F1.
It is considered a general coding best practice to declare a function as being local. Over time you could see that the NAV Team was also adhering this, even though C/SIDE wasn't helping a lot on this as new functions would by default be global, i.e. the property Local would be <No> (or you might say undefined). Now with NAV 2015 any new function will get Local=Yes.
Well, that's not always true I found out today by accident when writing my previous post. It appears to be depending on the Subtype of the codeunit.
If Subtype is ...
Well, I did and noticed something that has been there apparently for some time ...
... a year or so, since NAV 2013 R2. I surely had noticed that since then the C/AL editor shows the attributes. A simple but valuable feature that makes my live a lot easier.
So, no, this is not what I wanted to address here - I recon you did read the title.
Have a look:
Maybe a bit to much. And now?
The first part ... wasn't there before NAV 2013 R2. You can now easily see in what function you are, on what line and column.
... did you notice and I am just wasting your time?