C/AL

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.

[click to continue reading…]

{ 15 comments }

Printing NAV reports in different languages

by Vjekoslav Babic on 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 design, usability, standards and best practices. I’ll plain ignore the fact that it does use a few C/SIDE or C/AL references, so please, do likewise ;-)

(I said this because I kind of swore not to C/AL around this blog anymore, but again – sometimes I just have to do it.)

[click to continue reading…]

{ 1 comment }

Default database approach

by Vjekoslav Babic on November 11, 2008

Last Friday, while enjoying a not-at-all healthy Salisbury steak with cheese, I had an interesting discussion with a partner: should NAV consultancies create default databases?

A default database (in this context) is a packaged solution built upon standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV, where a consultancy has introduced a number of features that they sell to all their customers as the standard solution, instead of standard NAV. The modifications to standard NAV can range from simple report adornments to minor feature improvements  to full-scale horizontal or vertical functionalities.

[click to continue reading…]

{ 0 comments }

Featuritis Cure

by Vjekoslav Babic on October 24, 2008

Don’t you just love when users come up with new feature ideas at a microprocessor clock rate. Even before you finish developing one, five new requests pop up. This is a disease, and it’s called featuritis!

[click to continue reading…]

{ 1 comment }

NeverENDing story

by Vjekoslav Babic on September 10, 2008

Hint: this is a post for developers, and mostly junior developers, those who are still learning how to code properly. I know, I promised not to blog about stuff like this, but I simply couldn’t help this time.

A friend of mine has asked me for help.

“There is this C/AL function I had to rewrite, now I end up with 106 BEGINs, and only 105 ENDs. Do you have any idea how to find where this missing END belongs?”

[click to continue reading…]

{ 0 comments }

Estimated time left

June 18, 2008

I promised to myself not to post technical stuff on this blog. But as Seth Godin said not that long ago, never’s not such a long time. And also, why shouldn’t I share a piece of useful advice if I have it. So here it goes. Have you ever started a lengthy NAV batch job, [...]

[click to continue reading…]

Code of coding 4: Die, hard(coding) 2

February 27, 2008

In Croatia, most of roads resemble battlefields. They are so full of holes and patches from all kinds of repairs over time, that they have to re-pave them every five years or so. It is an awful waste of taxpayer’s money, and makes you wish for the world of Jennifer Government to come be. Anyway, [...]

[click to continue reading…]

Code of coding 3: Die, hard(coding)!

February 26, 2008

Development is an important phase of implementation of a highly-customizable ERP system, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and that’s why I put a lot of emphasis on development, specifically on coding part of it. I’ve tried to cover a few do’s and don’ts of coding, but so far I’ve left one of my favorite clay [...]

[click to continue reading…]

Code of coding 2: Documenting changes

February 15, 2008

Few days ago, when I wrote about coding, I didn’t have a slightest idea that at the same time, at the completely opposite part of the globe, Dave was blogging almost about the same thing. It is interesting to know that I am not the only one out there actually worying about code, and how [...]

[click to continue reading…]

Code of coding

February 13, 2008

Code is boring. It is geeky. And it’s ugly, too. In C/AL it is especially ugly. While contemporary development tools come with all sort of gizmos which make coding easier, such as color-coding, auto-completion, refactoring, etc., C/AL editor seems like having awaken from a thousand-year sleep. Take a look at the color coding: there is none. Or there [...]

[click to continue reading…]

Convergence

June 4, 2007

It has been a while since I was here, and I will not try to make any excuses. I could say that I have been busy (which would be true), and that I have a family that I love spending my time with (which would also be true), but true reason is the one you [...]

[click to continue reading…]