Navigate Into Success

Retiring NavigateIntoSuccess.com

2013-05-18T21:02:53Z

A couple of months ago, when I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter if anybody knows how to move a WordPress blog to another domain, everybody said that I was crazy. You don’t do these things, they said. And yet, when they heard the reason why I was about to leave my old domain, everybody agreed. NavigateIntoSucess.com has served me well. I moved my public WordPress website to this custom domain very early on. It has become a kind of a brand. But it is a pretty long name. You can easily mistype...(read more)

How Do I… Videos on MSDN

2013-03-16T14:01:00Z

MSDN has started running a series of the How do I… videos for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 (feed here). The idea is to showcase a technical feature in 5-15 minutes. The project is still ongoing, but a number of videos have just been released and announced on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog. The project [...]...(read more)

Transaction Integrity with Connected Systems

2013-03-05T11:30:50Z

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 simply makes a synchronous call [...]...(read more)

Cross-Call State Sharing in Web Services

2013-02-21T00:11:52Z

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 is simple – there is no actual protocol that you use to communicate with NAV through SOAP. Calls are ad-hoc, essentially atomic, each one can accomplish a great deal of things in a single go, and it...(read more)

Some tips and hints about temporary tables

2012-11-01T10:26:53Z

Temporary tables in NAV are a great thing, and are frequently used, but there are some misconceptions about them. I see developers do the same mistakes time after time and again. In this post I’ll address some common misconceptions and give some tips and hints that you can use in practice. There may be a lot of basics for you here, in which case just skip to the end: there I give you a nice tip about how to prevent accidental changes to physical tables when you expect that a table is temporary...(read more)

Web Services Black Belt: consuming NAV web services using pure C/AL

2012-09-30T20:23:29Z

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. It was kind of clumsy, inflexible, but it worked. How cool would it be if you could do something like this: WITH WebService DO BEGIN CONNECT(‘ http://localhost:7047/DynamicsNAV70...(read more)

Benchmarking Results: NAV 2013 Outperforms All Previous Versions

2012-06-25T06:50:00Z

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 series of five different tests that measure different aspects of NAV data handling. My conclusion is clear: NAV 2013 is faster than any NAV you have ever seen, including the Classic client on the native...(read more)

Top 5 SQL Server Improvements in NAV 2013

2012-06-21T20:13:05Z

Performance is one of those things you can’t get enough of and NAV is one of those systems where an extra operation per second is always welcome. Yesterday, during the Expert Panel at the NAV day of the Decisions Spring conference, there was a question: is there any improvement in how NAV 2013 works on SQL Server. And the answer is: oh yeah! As a matter of fact, everything is new and improved. Jörg has already posted an overview of the news of NAV on SQL Server in his last blog post , but I...(read more)

NAV Expert Panel Session Begins

2012-06-20T11:53:19Z

I’m right now sitting in the virtual lobby of the NAV Expert Panel Session of the NAV day of the Decisions Spring 2012 conference. The panel features three MVPs, three book authors, and established members of the NAV community: Eric Wauters, Matt Traxinger, Steven Renders, Brent Fisher and myself. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 beta out and a lot of partners having laid their hands on it, I assume the discussion will develop around NAV 2013 topics. I don’t know how much time I’ll have during...(read more)

Decisions Spring 2013 Kicking-off Next Week

2012-06-14T07:45:21Z

Make sure not to miss Decisions , the virtual conference about Microsoft Dynamics, by MSDynamicsWorld.com . It’s starting next Monday, and I hope you already have it in your calendar. It’s a four day conference, a day per Dynamics flavor (SL is the only one not being served). The best of all – it’s free! Be there. The Microsoft Dynamics NAV day is on Wednesday, June 20, and it’s featuring a program manager from Microsoft, three MVPs, (at least) three book authors, and a team of seasoned professionals...(read more)

Unlimited Text Length in NAV 2013

2012-06-13T20:25:36Z

Have you noticed already that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the text variables can have unlimited length? That’s quite a leap ahead of the previous versions which couldn’t handle more than 1024 characters per variable. If you wanted to achieve bug-free code then, when you were assigning texts around, you had to concatenate the result down to the MAXSTRLEN of the target text. Not anymore. The trick is to simply not declare the Length property on text variables. If you declare a variable of type...(read more)

Length of G/L Account Name in NAV 2013

2012-06-10T08:41:46Z

A small but important change often slips under the radar of the What’s New kinds of documents. One of those is the standard length of the Name field in G/L Account table. I’ve just noticed that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the length of this field has been increased from 30 characters to 50 characters. While this seams a minor thing, it’s actually a huge improvement. If 30 characters was not enough in previous versions, increasing it was not a simple thing to do, and required you to change thirty...(read more)

NAV 2013 beta mini-launch at Adriatics Community

2012-05-22T08:52:04Z

If you want to learn more about the upcoming release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, and you are from Zagreb, or don’t mind coming to it, the next community event of Microsoft Dynamics Community Adriatics will be fully dedicated to NAV 2013. There are going to be two presentations. In the first one on the topic of “What’s new in application functionality”, hosted by Ivan Koletić, a member of Microsoft Dynamics NAV product team, who will give an overview of new application features in NAV 2013,...(read more)

Generics in .NET Interop for NAV 2013

2012-05-17T22:55:54Z

.NET Framework is full of programming conceptual gems, that are now at the fingertips of us poor C/AL folks. One of those is generics . However, the C/AL support for generics at the first glance seems rather limited, and the help file says that you can’t specify data types, and that all generics will be instantiated with System.Object as their type. However, with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, there is a very simple way which allows you to use generics with other data types, as well. So, if .NET...(read more)

Hello, unicode!

2012-05-17T08:11:52Z

你好，世界！გამარჯობა, მსოფლიო! હેલો, વિશ્વ! مرحبا، العالم! שלום, עולם! नमस्ते, दुनिया! こんにちは世界 ಹಲೋ, ವಿಶ್ವದ! 안녕하세요, 세계! Γεια σου, κόσμε! Привет, мир! வணக்கம், உலக! హలో, ప్రపంచం! สวัสดีโลก! No, no, I didn’t go fully crazy yet, but I’m surely closing in. Maybe it’s not at all such a big deal as I see it, but the new Unicode support in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 is just blowing my socks off. After a quarter century of being tied to a single code page of choice, NAV has finally been freed of it’s single...(read more)

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Beta Available!

2012-05-14T20:20:48Z

I don’t know about you, but I think today is a great day: Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Beta has been published on PartnerSource, and if you have access, you can download it from here . I’ve been playing around with CTPs for more quite a while, and even though I can’t share any specifics, I can assure you: this is definitely the best release ever, technically, architecturally, functionally and from business value perspective. Whatever angle you take – this release is massive. I believe I don’t...(read more)

Dynamics Top 100 Nominations for 2012

2012-03-03T11:52:04Z

It’s the fourth year of DynamicsWorld’s Microsoft Dynamics Most Influential People Top 100 list, and it’s the nomination time. Last year I’ve somehow found my way onto this list (and I certainly didn’t nominate myself), and it seems somebody has nominated me this year too (and again, it wasn’t me). Now, I don’t want to influence you to put me on this list in 2012 again, but if you think I deserve it, I’d appreciate if you took time and voted for me. You can do it by sending an e-mail to top100...(read more)

Passing strongly-typed data to Web services

2012-02-22T01:32:59Z

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 (see this ). What the heck, just encode the data as EN-US, right? Not quite. There are a myriad of reasons why data can come in non-EN-US encoding, one of which is this: it’s the Web services...(read more)

Microsoft Dynamics Mayhem

2012-02-16T09:13:59Z

If you thought “here he comes again” with the bugs and stuff, no – this is not about it. This is just about a new sales campaign launched by PACKT Publishing , the good guys who published my and Dave’s book three years ago, and plenty other good books thereafter, as well. So, if you haven’t purchased my book yet, or any other cool Dynamics book, now is the time: during February, PACKT is giving 10% to 30% percent discount on all of its Dynamics books and offerings. Printed books are 20% off, e...(read more)

Web Reference vs. Service Reference, Part 3

2012-01-31T00:44:13Z

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 where Service Reference won’t work as expected, and Web Service will. This time, you don’t need to create new objects, you can simply run what’s already there in NAV. Just publish the page...(read more)

Web Reference vs. Service Reference, Part 2

2012-01-30T07:04:49Z

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 platform, it’s not the fault of the Web service being called, it’s the fault of the caller platform. As I said in the last post, there are two ways, or platforms if you wish, native to .NET Framework...(read more)

Web Reference vs. Service Reference, Part 1

2012-01-27T16:38:55Z

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 a class which wraps a Web service functionality into a strongly-typed .NET object, and allows simpler communication through Web services. It hides away all intricacies of SOAP communication, authentication...(read more)

Bug theater in Web services #5

2012-01-23T09:38:13Z

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 time available with my closest and dearest, which I am not sure when I will have next. It seems that there is life to keep going on, so I’ll now try to be back with my work and my blog. Let me...(read more)

Bug theater in Web services #4

2012-01-16T07:00:00Z

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 great. They are a good horse. A winner. The reason why I am doing this is because I want to share the problems I encountered over months of working with Web services intensively, as well as the solutions...(read more)

Bug theater in Web services #3

2012-01-13T09:24:28Z

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 on what exactly you do with Web services, it may be more than just a nuisance. Hello, bug #3: accessing WSDL without database-wide permissions. Problem This one is very simple to repeat, and you...(read more)