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…

Tomorrow exactly one month ago I wrote this post, based on the update in a number of test codeunits in NAV 2018 CU3: Let's talk about Shared Fixture and how to profit from this with the Dynamics NAV Test Toolkit . Just now I finished upgrading our test code to NAV 2018 CU4. It was a lot of work as I had to manually check a lot, but, wow, MS did an even greater job. The redesign introduced in CU3, and implemented on the first 100 test codeunits, now has been continued on an even larger number of…

It's been a while that I wrote on NAV and automated tests. In the meanwhile I have been teaching a lot all over Europe, and, yes, advocating test automation in NAV. And what did you do since my last post How-to: Run Standard Tests against Your Code ? Did you dare and try? And did you also have the time/guts to continue with it? I know some that did. Meanwhile I succeeded to get MS listen and implement a major request I had posed already some time ago. We'll get to that below as it relates to the…

The other day I wanted to get my local NAV 2018 installation fully working. Fully local, including VSCode. And ... setup an extra database with its own service tier. In the end it was quite easy, not in the least to some very helpful resources (see below), but I ran into a couple of other issues I needed to get fixed. It might be of help to you. Knowing I will typically forget the details, it surely will be to me in the near future. But take advantage of it, if needed. And if you have other…

The other day I had to update the objects I use in my training, from 2017 and 2018. Not a lot altogether, thus easy to do this manually and have a look at the changes. I was glad to have to do this as it showed that a number of fields have been stretched. Fields we typically use in our solution, be it the standard fields themselves or clones of them on our own objects. So next to the code merge from 2016 to 2018 we were starting on, we were to update our code according to these findings. …