Technology

The Beauty and The Beast: NAV and .NET

by Vjekoslav Babic on September 30, 2011

imageIf there wasn’t one already, someone should have invented Belgium. There are two things in this world that I love, and probably shouldn’t (and an oversized red speaker’s shirt I got from Luc today did a darned god job at concealing the unlucky consequences of overly indulging in both of them): beer and chocolate. Boy, do Belgians know their beer and chocolate!

But they know their NAV, too, and after NAV TechDays 2011, which have just ended in Antwerp, and two days of top NAV content, I can only say – great job, Luc and the team, and please make it a tradition.

If you attended my presentation about .NET interoperability, then there are a couple of demos I couldn’t deliver due to time constraints, and I promised to blog it. So, here we go.

It’s about streams. You already know that in NAV there are two data types, InStream and OutStream, that allow you to stream data in and out of generic sources or destinations. They are a fantastic tool, because they require you to know nothing about the type of source or destination, and you can store and retrieve data without having to care if the data comes from Internet, or a BLOB field, or is it written to a file, or transported over an XMLport. Stream makes it abstract and allows you to simply handle the data, and make the object itself care about the specifics.

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Error With Exposing Currencies As Web Services

by Vjekoslav Babic on May 12, 2010

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 wrong.

Here’s an example of the error:

There is an error in XML document (1, 3634).

The error took me a while to debug and pinpoint the source, but in the end I managed to find a neat solution which I find worth sharing here, just in case somebody out there is scratching their had over it.

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Van Vugt’s dynamiXs

by Vjekoslav Babic on April 11, 2010

A year ago I used to run a monthly roundup of NAV blogs and give you a short gist of who said what. Then I got lazy and stopped blogging on the weekly basis, and boy what a mistake I did – because some nice new blogs appeared in the meantime. I am somewhat ashamed that I learned about this blog only recently, but there is a gem out there you shouldn’t miss: Van Vugt’s dynamiXs.

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WinDays9: see you in Opatija next week!

by Vjekoslav Babic on April 20, 2009

imageOften you don’t even notice how quickly time goes by, except for a few milestones, which happen once a year and remind you that another one’s over.

WinDays conference is one of such milestones, and I’ve barely published a handful of posts here since the last time it was the most discussed topic in Croatian IT community. So, an incredibly short year later, here’s another one: WinDays9.

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Is agile ERP implementation possible?

by Vjekoslav Babic on March 12, 2009

image Agile has been gaining momentum among software development methodologies for past decade or so. Various researches and surveys consistently show that software developed under an agile approach is generally better than the software developed under waterfall approaches.

At the core of any agile approach is an assumption that whatever the requirements might be at the beginning of a project, they won’t be the same at the end of the project. The longer the project, the more truth there is in this assumption. To mitigate this situation, agile methodologies start with smaller sets of requirements, they start small and deliver functionality incrementally in a series of releases. No single release covers all requirements, but every release delivers more than the previous one.

With ERP implementations, we generally don’t subscribe to this idea. And at that, we might be wrong.

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Printing NAV reports in different languages

March 6, 2009

Last week I delivered the C/SIDE Development course for partner community in Zagreb. As always, questions abound afterwards. Today, I’ve got a question from an attendee: “What’s the best way to print a report in multiple languages?”. Up front: this is NOT a technical post. It IS about technical solution, but it is primarily about [...]

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Panorama’s ERP Report reveals important facts

March 5, 2009

For a long time, the ruler of project reports was Standish Group’s (in)famous Chaos report, which analyzed IT project success/failure factors. While many of the Chaos report’s findings applied to ERP implementation, the report as a whole was primarily about software development projects. And as we all know, implementing ERP is not the same thing [...]

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Associazione Marittima di Sabioncello

February 19, 2009

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 an expanding [...]

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Why is add-on better than custom, any day?

February 16, 2009

Implementation is like marriage. For better or worse, you choose a piece of software, take it under your roof and commit to it for a long term, so help you God. And as in marriage, if you want to live happily ever after with your new software, the my way or the highway attitude doesn’t [...]

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Top 12 Microsoft Dynamics NAV features to defeat recession

February 12, 2009

There are three kinds of people: those who watch things happen, those who make things happen, and those who wonder what happened. The world is in crisis. Some countries are hit harder than the others, some markets have sunk deeper than the others, but the effects of global economic recession are obvious, and if the [...]

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Cookbook user experience, anyone?

January 28, 2009

I’ll never forget my first NAV project. I was helping a customer migrate data from their old COBOL-based application, and was spending most of my time with a mid-aged lady who at first fascinated me with her mastery of their old application. That was until I found out she actually had no clue whatsoever about [...]

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