by Vjekoslav Babic on March 5, 2013
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 to external systems, such as web services.
Any external call is an expected point of failure. An important question you must always have in mind when calling external functions is transaction integrity. When writing code that targets only NAV, the structure of code is largely irrelevant, as long as you are not using COMMITs (which is another thing you should avoid at all costs). However, as soon as you introduce external calls, the structure becomes critically relevant. Critically relevant.
I’ve talked about this during my 2012 NAV TechDays session, and I promised I’d blog about it – so, here it goes.
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by Vjekoslav Babic on September 28, 2010
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog has just published a mega-useful post about recommendations for configuring Microsoft SQL Server for optimum Microsoft Dynamics NAV Performance. If you haven’t yet, you should check it here.
The blog post delivers a PDF document summarizing certain important parameters, configuration settings and suggestions for improving and maintaining a speedy SQL Server for your NAV installation. The recommendations have been written for x64 version of SQL Server 2005 SP3, SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 R2. The document was compiled by Michael De Voe, a Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft specializing in performance, scalability, infrastructure and high-availability for in NAV and AX.
by Vjekoslav Babic on September 14, 2010
Design is one of a kind. Other phases in Sure Step are understood and accepted as good and necessary. But design, do we really do that? Is it really necessary? Who’s going to pay for it? Does the customer really need all those documents? Instead of writing documents, you could have it developed in the same, or less time. And so on and so forth.
As a matter of fact, if you asked me to pick one single most important phase in a Sure Step project, then it’s the design. No second thoughts here, whatsoever.
Here I list the ten most important reasons that I believe make design absolutely indispensable.
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by Vjekoslav Babic on September 9, 2010
While designing a custom functionality for a customer, there was an issue with posting groups: the way the custom functionality was designed would result in value entries being always posted to a single posting group, resulting in inventory balances always going to the same inventory account.
When I brought this issue to my customer’s attention, they said: “but we only have one single inventory account, and we only use one single posting group, so we don’t need this functionality to be smart about this”.
This was an example of what I like to call setup-dependent requirements.
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by Vjekoslav Babic on September 6, 2010
So I would guess that was it. I’m just returning to Kristiansand, my Norwegian base, after delivering the “Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Development Best Practices” course to a partner, my first custom-developed training ever. My impression is—mission accomplished.
I was not sure at first how this would turn out. Teaching NAV best practices to people some of whom have more experience than I’ll have any time soon, isn’t an easy thing. The challenge for me was—how to deliver something new, really valuable to those people, something they could go home with saying “wow, if only I knew this earlier”.
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