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Yesterday you’ve seen how to use gulp to make it do something truly useful: bundling your JavaScript and CSS files. Introducing gulp for the purpose of bundling your files allows you to split your functionality into as many files as you want, but use only a single script and a single stylesheet file from your control add-in. That way you not only optimized how your browser loads the files, but you also eliminated the need to maintain your controladdin object file every single time a new JavaScript or CSS file is added (or an existing one is removed). However, you still need to run gulp build…

My last demo introduced gulp, an amazingly simple task automation tool. You’ve seen what it is, how to set it up, and how to create a simple hello-world task. Now it’s time to teach gulp some useful tricks and make it automate the “build” process for the JavaScript and CSS files. The first demo in this series used a single-file approach, and there I stated that it’s a bad thing to develop like that. It’s bad to put all the functionality in one single file. However, that rule applies for development, not for runtime. Your browser actually prefers using a smaller number of JavaScript (or CSS)…

Get ready for the next big step in taking the control add-in development to the next level. Today, I am (re)introducing gulp. I’ve blogged about gulp in the past, but I’ve never really finished that series. Life and work got in the way. But while I may not have blogged about it much, it’s been my companion for quite some time now, and now I want it to become yours, too. In previous “Control Add-ins Supercharged” examples we’ve mostly explored how not to do things. Now we are ready to take a look in the opposite direction and start talking about how to do do things. For this example, I’ll…

In the last example I put online, we’ve noticed that it was difficult to achieve a good separation of concerns in the front end if we are building UI directly through DOM . Apart from the fact that it’s very inefficient, manipulating DOM directly makes it very difficult to structure your front-end logic. You quickly realize you need a framework for that. And here I come to a big fat point I want to make once again, that I made in my session, too: don’t build a new framework; pick one off the shelf. The thing is, in the JavaScript world there are ridiculously many frameworks. This article on…

NAV TechDays is simply the best NAV / Business Central conference there is. I can miss Directions, I can miss other events, but NAV TechDays – no way. There are few events which can match that energy, that community spirit, that enthusiasm, that top-notch deep-dive content. No, there are not few that can match it; there are none that can. And then when you consider that they manage to attract ever more people to it, all that while publishing all conference content less than a week after conference is over – it just proves to you that the value of NAV TechDays is not in its content or its sessions…

If you know me, you know that I am obsessed with separation of concerns . It’s the core principle of good design, and good design is what I am always striving for. The original Control Add-ins Supercharged example showcased how most of non-web developers (a category into which most of AL developers squarely fall) would develop a control add-in: just stuff everything into a single script, and all is fine. But it isn’t fine, if for nothing else, then because it can be done much better. My next example is showing how you might attempt to solve the separation of concerns issue. The first step…

Control add-ins have always been my passion. Not only because I’ve been working with JavaScript since 1996, and I could call it my mother tongue, but because I just love how they allow us to create amazing user interfaces. Business Central has made huge progress in terms of usability of the web client, however it’s still not the most user friendly thing out there, and performing some tasks may be tedious. Control add-ins help because they allow us to develop custom user interface over standard data and processes. However, when building control add-ins, it’s not only about what we build, but…

There is a particular programming language feature that I’ve always missed in AL (and C/AL for that matter): interfaces. I’ve dreamt about it , then blogged about it , then finally created a feature request in Microsoft’s AL GitHub repository . My GitHub feature request caught quite some traction and became the most upvoted feature request in less than a day. Now, I don’t know if or to what extent it was my submission that influenced Microsoft, but it doesn’t really matter – what matters is that it’s becoming reality. Last week at NAV TechDays, Microsoft has presented an amazing new feature…

This year’s NAV TechDays was again an amazing event. More than 1400 participants, 18 sessions, great content, it again surpassed the records set last year. It was an honor and a pleasure to be able to speak again. This blog post is not about the conference – I am not a news reported This is merely about demos that Waldo and I delivered on November 22, during our session named {ConnectApp}². There were two React Native demos, and I have now published their source code on GitHub: The “Killer App” is available here: https://github.com/vjekob/ntd_killer_demo/ The “Main Demo” (I won’t use…

Now that you are done through this mouthful of the title, you may recognize that it’s the method you invoke when you want to run a control add-in trigger in AL from JavaScript. There is nothing new about this method itself, it’s just that most people aren’t aware of full power of this method, and they are using this method in a very inefficient way. In this blog, I want to show you what this method can do for you that you may have not been aware of. And I hope I get you to change your habits. The syntax is this: Microsoft.Dynamics.NAV.InvokeExtensibilityMethod(name, args[, skipIfBusy…