RE: UPGRADE from NAV 2009 to NAV 2016- best approach for developers?
Hi Carlos,
Let me share our experiences so far as we are still in the technical phase of our upgrade form 2009 (R2) to 2016. Meaning that we are still upgrading the code. We are doing this step by step while first getting all our forms and reports to RTC on NAV 2009 R2. FYI: we are an end-user in-house development team.
Once this RTC thing is ready we will fully focus on NAV 2016.
So what did we do with getting our code from 2009 to 2016?
We used the merge utilities MS has provided us with since NAV 2013 R2 to merge our code. It does a good job, but still a lot of manual work as it is a big step from 2009 to 2016.
One thing we would do differently is the following: in 2009 code we still have forms and these of course will be removed (likewise Dataports). But also the word form was used in various properties (for example SubFormLink) and statements (for example FORM.RUM) and should be replaced with page. For that MS had provided us with a tool on the NAV2013 product CD: TextFormatUpgrade2013 Tool (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj551752(v=nav.71).aspx). This you can run on your code to do the replacement. So we applied this tool on our code, but did forget to apply to the standard 2009 R2 code. This made the merge more laborious then needed.
What we would do now is either (1) apply the tool to both standard 2009 and our 2009 code or (2) not apply it at all as the merge utilities probably will solve it very nicely already. We would opt for (2), but I must mention that we did not check the latter as we have the code now in place.
Regarding reports: you need to first technically upgrade them from 2009 to 2013 as in 2013 the report data set was introduced and (of course) the classic lay-out was deprecated. This needs to be done with a NAV 2013 (RTM) Development Client: msdn.microsoft.com/.../hh165524(NAV.70).aspx.
This is were we are so far.
Good luck and b rg
Luc