While developing your own extension on NAV 2018 or "BC under version 15" you have the availability over 2 debuggers: the VSCode debugger and the C/SIDE (or should we call it Windows) debugger. Both serve a somewhat different scenario: VSCode debugger You want to run step-by-step through the code of your extension - being AL code - and from there might step into the code that resides in the NAV/BC installation you are programming against. Most probably the C/AL code of the standard application…

Having been working on a fully automated DTAP street for the past year using Azure DevOps , we are now getting in the phase of tightening the last nuts and bolts . This typically is about completing some part of the automation still, but mainly it's about getting all the sources in the right place. And with all the source I do mean all the sources. Any source that relates to some part of our solution and needs to be deployable in whatever part of our DTAP street, should become part of this automated…

Sitting in the train up North on my biweekly trip to my main employer I came across Tobi's early tweet: A big joy that this great technical mind and very nice fellow human, will be MVP for another year. He's worth so much of it, like various other MVPs. And ah, yes, July 1, which since two year now has become the regular renewal date of the MVP Award. No longer April 1 as it used to be for a quarter of the MVP's, and me belonging to the same batch. Automatically the question came to mind whether…

If you read my book and want to confront me live, or too lazy to read it (yet) and want to hear me speaking or teaching, or you did not get to buy the book yet, you will have a number of chances to do so: May 18, 2019, 365 Saturday Amsterdam 2019 , Netherlands I wil present Test Automation for Business Central . May 24, 2019, Days of Knowledge , Odense, Denmark I wil be presenting with Erik Ernst and Palle Arentoft on how to speed up your development including automated testing. June…

You might not have noticed anything about it yet, but after 260 hours, spread over 5 months, of designing, coding, writing, and reviewing on my side, my first book , and the first book on test automation for Microsoft Dynamics NAV / Dynamics 365 Business Central has been released last week. Finally, a wish came true, an ambition, started probabably back in 2011 with my series on NAV and Test-Drive Development . Having been a tester in the Global Localization Development team at Microsoft (and…

.. compared to non-UI, or so-called headless, testing. That was one of the major reasons that the testability framework was added to the Dynamics NAV platform back in 2009 by MS. It replaced its predecessor, the NAV Test Framework (NTF). NTF was a C# based test framework that allowed you to script test in C# against the NAV UI. Having 40+ country versions to handle, and a couple of major releases, running thousands of UI tests took simply too long to check each country-version build. At that…

The other day we found out that some part of one of our extensions was not uploaded to our source code repository and no local version was available anymore. But we did have the .app file. I knew from extensions version 1.0 that the extension file, the .navx, was a zipped set of files. The x in .navx is pointing at this as with all office file extensions now a days. You might recall one of my old posts . As per this blog post, but then in reverse order, would I be able to unzip the .app file by…

[Just a note to myself as I always need to look up what to download and install on Visual Studio 2017 to allow me to work on RDLC layouts for my reports.] When opening the layout of a printable report from C/SIDE report designer Visual Studio 2017 will be opened. When you have a new installation of VS 2017, the layout will however be shown in xml format only. In previous versions of Visual Studio the issue was solved by installing SQL Data Tools Trying the same for VS 2017 will not help you…

For those of you that have been following me for a reasonable number of years: you might have stumbled across my testimonial . It clearly marked a threshold in my professional carrier, and in hindsight it was worth all the while taking it. And now I am on the verge of adding another 7 years. Next week Thursday, to be precise, when I will be down south in California, when conference season has just taken off. My conference season and a whole new training season too. May I invite me to join me in…

Or freely translated from an old Dutch saying ( Doe de deur dicht! Je bent toch niet in de kerk geboren?): Close that FastTab! Have you been born in church? ... meaning: keep the door closed, do not spoil the heat inside. And that's what this small post is about: have a better performance by collapsing the FastTabs on your pages. After our upgrade to NAV 2018 we experienced a number of performance issues. One I blogged about some months ago. Another concerned the loading time of the Item Card…

Start of this year we upgraded our NAV 2016 installation to NAV 2018 RTM. And February 26 we were live. It was a relative smooth and fast upgrade and we were quite pleased with it. We ran however into a couple of performance issues of which one them exposed itself immediately after go-live. We were pointed to it by one of our sistering team's consuming a number of NAV web services in their application. But unfortunately we couldn't get a hold on what was exactly happening, so it was lingering…

More or less coincidentally I stumbled over the topic of this post a couple of weeks ago in my next endeavor to raise the success rate of the MS test suite on our solution. A task being picked up every once in while, next to all the normal work. The major approach so far in getting as much as possible MS tests working has been a statistical one: look for the most occurring error and get it solved; subsequently take the next most occurring and so on. In 1 week the success rate raised from 23…