Vjeko.com

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…

Happy new year everyone! Last year was a bit slow for me, until the very end, when I churned out a year’s worth of posts just in two days. I hope this year to be a bit different, and let me kick-start it with a concept I’ve been playing with recently. If you are into control add-ins development, chances are you’re familiar with my Visual Studio Project Template for control add-ins . It’s cool because it allows you to deploy all of your changes all the way over to NAV just by pressing F6. But it sucks because it’s based on Visual Studio, which is so… not 2019. It’s true, Microsoft never prescribed…

The last of the NAV TechDays 2018 demo series comes with a little story. While Waldo and I were preparing the “Evolution of the Titan” session, on Sunday before the conference, we were brainstorming the ideas of what would constitute a cool non-visual JavaScript demo. I wanted to showcase the things that JavaScript can do for you in control add-in context, but a less obvious thing. Everyone is expecting to see some cool visual demos, but I wanted to point out the vast possibilities in the non-visual area. Then Waldo asked me: can you make it run an action on a keypress, like post a document…

One of the more effective, and probably completely unexpected, demos at Waldo’s and mine NAV TechDays 2018 session was the user profile picture demo. I say “completely unexpected” is that it shows something that you normally don’t expect from control add-ins. When hearing “control add-in”, most developers (but also most Microsoft people) have in mind a visual control that visualizes some data from NAV/BC and possibly allows you to interact with (C/)AL through that piece of UI. However, there are many other things possible, like having a completely non-visual “controls” that tap into the functionality…

Eric Sevareid famously said that the chief cause of problems is solutions . The same applies to the HTML trick I blogged about yesterday. As soon as you solve the problem of using HTML directly in your control add-ins, another problem arises: what do you do with actual images your control add-in includes? This post explains how to solve that problem, and how to make it possible for your control add-in to both use HTML for defining UI and use relative control add-in paths to images. Let’s dig in. Imagine you had a control add-in with this script: … that shows this: Now, you fix…

I usually post my NAV TechDays demo stuff for you to use and abuse, and this year won’t be an exception. There are three changes, to previous years, specially the last year. First, you won’t need to wait until New Year’s Eve for me to post my stuff. Second, I’ll blog each of the demos individually, because of the third reason. Third, I don’t want to merely dump my code here with a big fat disclaimer; no – I’ll dump it with a big fat disclaimer and some explanations about what the code does and why. So, here we go, the first demo (actually the second, because I already posted that Muppet Theme…