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With .NET Interoperability around, it’s very likely you’ll be synchronously calling external web services from C/AL, to exchange data. I won’t go into discussing whether or not this kind of architecture is good (my own position is that it isn’t), you may end up having situations where your C/AL code...

Web services in NAV have an interesting feature: they are stateless. For a system which is pretty stateful otherwise, this feature can be outright annoying. You must get used to it, and then make sure you never ever write code as if there was any state preserved on the other end. The reason for this...

Have you ever needed to connect to the Web services of one NAV instance from another one? If so, I bet that the approach was something like this: you created a .NET class where you defined a Web or Service reference to the target instance, and then you consumed that .NET class using .NET Framework interoperability...

Marketing is nice as long as it matches the reality. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, Microsoft has promised a lot of improvements, but how well does NAV 2013 stand the reality test? Apparently, outstandingly well. Over the past two days, I have intensively tested NAV 2009 and NAV 2013 through a...

Passing strongly-typed data to NAV Web services can be trickier than it seems. If you are lucky, you can make your method accept strongly-typed parameters, and you are good to go. However, if you just can’t avoid sending text data, your text must be encoded in EN-US format, otherwise it will cause problems...

Fasten your seatbelts, you are in for the next round of Web Reference vs. Service Reference, which brings an unexpected twist to the story. After giving reasons why not to use Web References, I’ll now put my devil’s advocate ’s hat on, and try to have you change your mind. It’s simple: there are situations...

A beauty of Web services is that they don’t need to care at all about who’s consuming them. Whether there is .NET on Windows, Java on Linux or some proprietary stuff on an iPad on the other end, they do exactly the same stuff. To make it short: if something works on one platform and fails on another...

Once upon a time, Freddy has delivered a great series on connecting to NAV Web Services from a smorgasbord of technology flavors. If you are a .NET enthusiast, like me, the obvious choice is to connect through the tools that are at your disposal in Visual Studio: the proxy classes. A proxy class is...

Last Monday I’ve attended my second daughter’s birth, and then spent the week trying to relieve my wife as much as possible from anything but breastfeeding. As a matter of fact, I’d like to keep doing it, it was not only a great break from daily worries, but also a fantastic occasion to spend all the...

In my country, there’s a saying: “A good horse has a hundred flaws; a bad one has only one.” It’s bad. People have asked me why I am doing this, and if I hate Web services because I’m blogging about their flaws. In fact, I love Web services, and as I said in the first post in this series – they are...

Soren has taught me yesterday that some of the bugs I encountered have been properly disinsected by Microsoft, so other than the workarounds I suggested, there is an option to apply the hotfix and forget about that one. Today, I’ll explain a not so critical bug, as the one yesterday, but depending...

The bug with which I started this series is nothing critical. It manifests rarely, you can easily work around it. It’s in the “so what” category. But the one I’ll talk about today is a tough beast, with not-so-easy workarounds that cause as much headache as the bug itself. So, here comes bug #2:...

If something, Stratus has taught me how buggy the implementation of Web services in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is. Let me be clear from the onset: Web services are a great functionality in NAV, one of the best additions (together with .NET interop) to NAV stack in a long while. But it’s buggy. Being buggy...

The summer was hot in this part of the world, and Stratus only helped keep the heat up. We were not only snorkeling through the summer, we did a lot of work to keep up with our goal of going live in September, and we are still on track. So far so good. Over the past two months, we have done the following...

I’ve been asked too many times why I am not blogging more about Stratus, the web client for NAV developed by my company. People really want to know about it, and I am really keeping it far too silent. Let’s change that. Instead of sending a ridiculous amount of e-mails every day, I’ll just keep you all...

The Software Advice blog has started a series of short five minute interviews with Microsoft executives in charge of Dynamics technologies, and today’s one has caught my attention: it’s entitled Can Microsoft Dynamics ERP move to the cloud , and the interview was with Guy Weismantel, director of ERP...

Microsoft’s DPE team in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has started organizing a so called brown bag sessions for NAV developers, as a part of developing a Microsoft Dynamics Community in the region. As a part of this initiative, I will deliver a brown bag session tomorrow at 9:30 AM (CET) titled “Connecting...

A bug or a feature? Sometimes it’s hard to tell for sure. Web services are a fantastic tool in NAV, however, they do not always behave exactly as you would expect them to. There is one particularly annoying behavior, which just after you get used to it starts getting even stranger. So, setting any numeric...

Yesterday, during a coffee break at the What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Technical for Application Consultants training in Vilnius, Lithuania (a fabulous place, by the way), a discussion arose around the destiny of the Classic (or C/SIDE) client in NAV. Some participants stated that “it’s never...

If you try exposing Page 5 Currencies as a Web service in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, and then consuming this web service through a .NET application, you are almost guaranteed to encounter some unhelpful and generic XML errors that give you absolutely no clue about what exactly, where and why, went...

WinDays is here again. Year over year, it’s hard to come to terms with the time and how quickly it’s passing by. (Or is it just me getting old, and preferring to ignore that fact?) Anyway, this year is the tenth anniversary of the first WinDays, and the only one I ever attended as a tourist. This year...

A short story about maritime trading, steamboats and Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform in short to mid-term ERP and Microsoft Dynamics NAV perspective This is a story of a business which failed, and it didn’t have to. It had all the capital and resources it needed to grow, it held a solid share in...