Dynamics Nav 2009 Sp1

I recently downloaded the CTP 2 for NAV 2009 NA version. There have many blogs on new features added. I wanted to talk about some of development changes. First change is that DBCS (Double Byte Character Set) is no longer part of fin.stx but rather part of the database setting. The Validate CodePage has been changed to Validate Collation and you can uncheck it to enable DBCS.

Another feature added is that when you compile multiple objects, if there are any errors in previous version it would mark the records. In SP1 a window opens with the list of objects that could not be compiled.

Object wise from 2009, there are 145 tables, 302 forms, 455 reports, 285 pages, 190 code units that been modified. In total 1377 objects have been modified. That is a very high number of objects. This means that a lot of bugs have been fixed and reports/pages have new features added.
Freddy on his blog mentioned that non windows system can now connect to web service. I tried to and used SOAPUI but no success. SOAPUI is written in java.

There are two new function added EXPORTOBJECTS(FileName, ObjectRecord [, Format]) and IMPORTOBJECTS(FileName [, Format]). You can now import and export txt and xml files for objects. A great feature would be if Navision triggered in Codeunit 1 the OnGlobalModify(RecRef : RecordRef;xRecRef : RecordRef), onGlobalInsert, etc when you modified objects. We could keep history of modified objects and do code compare for each change. Right now you need to do this through sql stored procedures, but it would be nice to do it in NAV. This gives me another blog idea; using web service to turn NAV business logic through sql stored procedure. There are many other new features added for RTC in regards to allowing custom controls to be added. New reporting features, but I won’t repeat what other blogs have already mentioned. For existing customers I suggest to wait for sp1 before doing the upgrade.