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Those of you who know me, know that a big part of what I do is delivering talks at conferences. Talks, workshops, demos, that kind of stuff. More often than not, quite a lot of time goes into preparation of demos and labs, and also more often than not, the stuff that I prepare just remains in the digital piles of my Dropbox, and fades into oblivion. For three events this year (two Red Carpet events, and one Directions event) I’ve had a chance to prepare some demos and hands-ons around AI and Business Central, covering both what comes out of the box, and custom integration with things that are…

This post has been long overdue. I’ve had it in my to-do list for nearly four years now, but it always ended up in the not today category. Funny how many times I’ve implemented it already, and how many times I’ve presented this, and I never ever found a few minutes to create a demo repository and a blog to come with it. So, here we go. Including web fonts in your control add-ins is no rocket science, really. Control add-ins are just pieces of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in an iframe, so whatever you can do within an iframe from anywhere else, you can do it from control add-ins. Web fonts…

Out-of-the-box Business Central APIs often use complex types. Addresses on entities and documents, line details, units of measures, journal dimensions, these are just a few examples. There may be more. A typical instance of a complex type looks like this: The question is: can you do something like this in your own custom APIs? And the answer is: yes and no. Let’s start with the “yes” part of the answer. When you look at how standard API pages do complex types, you can see this: However, that’s not the entire story. Simply creating a text variable and make it contain serialized…

Just in case you have fallen victim of the confusion I see often in online communities, blogs, but also Microsoft official documentation: Dynamics 365 Business Central sandbox is not the same as Dynamics 365 Business Central preview. They are two different things. Keep in mind, in this blog post I am not talking about sandbox container environments (on-prem); I am only talking about online sandbox environments. This is not pure semantics. Things in sandbox environments (and I mean, real sandbox environments of Business Central) differ from things in  preview environments. Exactly a year…

In just under two weeks I’ll have to present how to use OAuth 2.0 authentication to call REST APIs of Dynamics 365 Business Central. Should be easy. Not only I have already done OAuth integrations , but there is also a nice step-by-step tutorial by Microsoft specifically done for Business Central. So, I followed the steps to the letter (as much as that was possible), and after all was done, I tried to use Postman to get myself an OAuth 2.0 token for invoking Business Central REST APIs, but it didn’t work. No matter what I did, Postman kept returning this: (Could not complete OAuth 2.0 login…

In the last post , I explained how to use tasks, but I didn’t explain yet how to make them useful. Tasks are most useful when they automate certain file operations, and gulp helps with reading and writing files. However, if you need to perform a transformation, then you need to look for plugins that can get that work done for you. In this post you’ll learn how to set up and use various plugins that can automate some common file operations. As gulp documentation says : Gulp plugins are Node Transform Streams that encapsulate common behavior to transform files in a pipeline – often placed between…

Now that you know how to get gulp up and running in VS Code , and how to export tasks from your gulp file , let’s talk about tasks themselves. What are they, what are they good for, and how to write them. Gulp – being a task automation tool – is all about tasks. Anything you do about programming, which is not writing the code itself, can be considered a task, and can very likely be automated. Some tasks are automated already, like compiling your code, building your app. In case of AL development, there are many more already automated tasks, like creating a demo workspace or deploying your app…

In my last post I covered the very basics of getting started with gulp in VS Code. It was all about getting gulp up and running under the hood of VS Code, and about writing your very first gulp task. It didn’t do much, but it showed you what gulpfile.js is good for and how to export tasks from it, that you can later use from VS Code. However, I mentioned that there is much more to exporting tasks than it seems on the surface, and I promised to blog more about it. So here we are. Tasks. Let’s take a look at our gulpfile.js where we left it last time: const gulp = require("gulp"); function…

Strange times. I never stop to be amazed with the kinds tools that invaded our pristine development environments. One of those tools is gulp , and if you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry. Why should you hear of it? A couple of weeks ago I introduced my talk on gulp by explaining how I made it simplify and speed up my development of control add-ins. If you are a real NAV developer, and if you didn’t classify this entire series on gulp into the “who cares” category, then chances are you’d stick with me today and learn how to set up gulp and start using it in VS Code. In this post, I’ll explain…

Nearly two and a half years ago I had a dream. It was about codeunit references and codeunit interfaces . And today, nearly two and a half years later I am still here, still having the same dream. We still cannot do codeunit interfaces in AL. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need them. We do. We badly do. Two things triggered me to write this post about how badly we need codeunit interfaces, or any kind of polymorphism: a NAV TechDays talk, and a github project I saw. The first one was an NAV 2018 TechDays talk by Torben Wind Meyhoff, Bardur Knudsen, and Jens Møller-Pedersen, all architects…