Waldo's Blog

I’m returning after a very interesting workshop on DevOps in Berlin .. . At this moment, I’m wasting my time in the very “attractive” TXL airport because of my delayed flight. And how can I better waste my time than to figure out some stuff regarding Business Central. Figuring out indeed, because I have barely internet, a crappy seat, nearly no access to food, … so for me this is a matter of bury myself so I don’t have to pay attention to my surroundings ;-). Anyway .. It’s not all that bad .. but a delayed flight is never nice. Anyway….. opic of today: the new systemId ! While I was converting…

Now Wave2 blogging is allowed, there are many topics that I want to share with you .. really, a lot. Time is not on my side – I’m in full preparation for Directions and NAVTechDays, so let’s see. Today, while working on my SaaS-deployment-pipeline in DevOps with ALOps , I DID find the time to say a few words on one of the topics I’m quite excited about: Shortcutkeys in the webclient, or in other words: full keyboard shortcut support ! In my “real world”, users (yes, I do have customers, although people sometimes seem to be thinking otherwise.. ) have been asking this for quite some time .…

You all know the designer , right? The tool for developers (aka the “in-client visual designer”) that “ provides an easy and convenient way of making immediate adjustments to your design by simply dragging and dropping the components on the page”. Well .. then you probably know there are things to take into account…  Issues It actually all comes down to what I call “the worst button in NAV ever created in history of mankind”. The “Design” button: Whoever uses that button, is actually doomed in any kind of scenario. What happens is: you open design mode without any context of “active…

Recently, I got the question on how to get a dependency tree from a bunch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central apps. In other words – how do I know in which order I have to import my apps to respect the dependencies . Well, I didn’t have a ready-made script available. I only had a script my colleague provided me – so I took that as a starting point, and spent an evening in trying to put something together – as it IS a very interesting question ;-). To be honest, we don’t need this in our company in our build pipeline, nor in our release pipeline. Nevertheless – I have heard the question…

Sometimes I get the remark that I’m not sceptical enough, but mostly too positive towards whatever Microsoft does … well – I have been very happy with the product, the progress, the evolution and the revolution. For all of you with that opinion about me – let me make you happy. You might have figured from my previous post that there is one topic that doesn’t make me particularly happy: “ Code Customizing the AL BaseApp” . The one thing I’m very opposed against – even more than dreadful properties like “ApplicationArea” and “ShowMandatory” ;-). “Code Customizing the AL BaseApp” is an ability…

A week ago, Microsoft came with this message on twitter: Which basically pointed to an URL that was (for me) difficult to find on Microsoft Docs. I literally had to find the tweet again to find the list of expected features again .. so I figured: If I have a problem finding it, others might have problems as well. So, here it is: The (updated) list of features we can expect in the 2019 Release Wave 2 Key dates for the 2019 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 When I just scheduled this blog, Eva Dupont tweeted this: I guess it’s very much “on topic”, so let’s include this URL as well: …

I totally forgot to blog about this – so let me quickly catch up with this one.. :-). Some time ago, after explaining my most used VSCode Extensions for AL Development for (about) the 829th time – I decided to make my life a bit easier. I already came across the concept of creating a VSCode Extension that act like packages that automatically install other extensions.  An “Extension Pack”, if you will ;-). So … here is the … AL Extension Pack You can find it here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=waldo.al-extension-pack And obviously, you can also download it from…

There is a recent change that I had to introduce in the CRS AL Language Extension – you know, that tiny little VSCode Extension that quite a lot of you seem to be using ;-). +89000 downloads/+21500 installs – that’s crazy! It’s one of my biggest projects I ever did for the community :-). Stop bragging, get to the point… Well – because of the fact that so many people are using the extension, I think I have to make you aware of an important change (fix) I did to the extension (already almost 3 weeks ago…). I have had a couple of requests to change the “rename” behaviour, which I had to implement…

Yes! I did it! I finally managed to created the blogpost that I have been wanting to put online for quite some time. I have been putting off a lot of other posts – just to be able to make this one happen asap! You might remember the post about Directions US 2019 – that I had some work to do . Well – let’s just say I’m trying to deliver on that promise – at least for 50% for now ;-). Namely, on – what I think – the most important part: DevOps Indeed! In my opinion, everybody of us (and I really mean everybody!) will – at one point in time – have to start organizing on how to develop in…

For long, we (as a partner community) have been asking for longer field lengths. And this time, Microsoft seems to have delivered: about 860 field lengths were changed. Mostly from Text50 to Text100, but also from Text30 to Text50 and so on. For your convenience, I created a csv on my “CALAnalysis”-repo on github that lists all of them. Caveats With this change, there are some caveats that I can think of – and there might be even more then I list here below. First of all: what if a Business Central database contains C/AL customizations or AL extensions or apps on AppSource? If a database…