Apr 11

Looking forward to reading some of the Convergence gossip from Atlanta, i got this link from a friend today. Definitely sounding interesting that Dynamics NAV will be the first Microsoft ERP product supported on the Microsoft Azure platform.

The next major releases of Dynamics AX, GP, NAV and SL will be developed to run on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud development platform that’s been available for a year, Tatarinov said, beginning with the next version of Dynamics NAV that’s due in 2012. The applications will support multi-tenancy, he said.

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Jan 20

This morning i was reading the blog post from Arend-Jan Kaufmann regarding opening Classic databases with the correct executable version. You can see his blog post here:

Suggestion for Available Databases Form in Dynamics NAV

It reminded me of a tool i basically use on a daily basis, as well as many other people in my company. It is an extended version of the Navision Starter v1.2 orignally created by Sergey Gazizyanov back in 2006. I have added support for the latest version, as well as shell integration for native databases (*.fdb), so you just double click on the FDB file.

The launcher will determine the database version from both SQL and native databases, and choose the right client executable to open the database with. It also can do automated login with database login, by using a default password like sa/sa.

See here for a quick overview…
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Dec 09

Every time you copy/paste data from NAV to Excel, you always run into the “intelligent” way Excel handles data. Excel’s default number format is “General”. Unfortunately this has some drawbacks, especially when you paste in data from another application.

Lets do this example, enter in a new cell with Number Format General, the value “001010”, and you will see Excel stores this as 1010, since it determined your value to be a Number. Of course we wanted it to be the equivalent of a NAV Code field, and expected Excel to keep it like “001010”. In order to do this you can for the field tell it is text by adding a ‘ in front. So far so good….

But when doing a copy/paste you dont have that option, so what to do?

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Nov 17

This post is a follow up to some of my previous posts about the Send to Word/Excel features of Dynamics NAV. As you know, it uses a stylesheet (xslt file), that is being read into memory and the codeunit 403 inserts values into the document.

This is definitely one of the cool demo features, when presenting NAV. At this point you dont realize that the Cronus logo is hardcoded into the stylesheets, but think it is just using the logo in the Company Information setup.

My previous post gave you some steps on how to change this. But this can be pretty cumbersome to say it at least. So when having to do it for the I dont know what time again, i decided to create a function that could automatically insert the picture from the Company Information.

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Oct 27

Since the days of Visual Basic 6, where we were creating OCX (Custom Controls) for Navision, and up till now with COM Interop with .NET programming language, the .NET platform has become a great development platform. But because of the limitations of interoperability in NAV we haven’t been able to use true .NET assemblies directly within NAV.

Until now! R2 as you know has announced its arrival in next month (hopefully), and with it the introduction of .NET interop.

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog has a great post on this subject, as well as real examples of how to use it. Check it out, this will rock your world!

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Oct 26

One of the most difficult errors in NAV to troubleshoot is: “The transaction cannot be completed because it will cause inconsistencies in the G/L Entry table”. In a standard, unmodified database it is usually related to tax/rounding issues. And in customized databases, it can be all sorts of issues.

I have seen all kinds of workarounds for figuring out the data/transaction that causes the inconsistency. Most of them have been way to complicated, doing all kinds of modifications to the posting codeunit, or looking up uncommitted records through sophisticated SQL queries. Until the post by Rashed Amini back in 2007 (can be found here on MIBUSO), there was no real good solution to it.

Unfortunately there is still a lot of developers that are not aware of this priceless trick, so let’s look into how he solved the issue of looking at the transactions that caused the inconsistency.

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Oct 06

Yesterdays post on assigning MenuSuite Menu’s programatically got a lot of hits, and i have been getting a couple of emails about how to create the data for the blob field. In this post I will show how to build the BLOB generator i Dynamics NAV.

The BLOB content is reverse engineered on Mayank’s Extreme Engineering blog.

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Oct 05

The other day i was reading Mayank’s new blog Extreme Engineering Network. Especially his post about assigning menu suites automatically was pretty neat. Well it could be, as it basically just gave you the information on _how_ you could do it. Looking at a lot of hex-editor information, i decided to give it a spin!

Assigning Menu Suites to users is a painful job for any adminstrator, as you have to go into design of the menu suite, and then for each Menu you have to uncheck the box for users that should not have access. And setting up a new user, gives access to everything by default, so you have to go into each menu to unassign – lots of work!

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Oct 02

After switching blogging software, due to a server crash i never really got the old posts reposted from the original blog. I have had a lot of requests for one particular post: Dynamics NAV and the ROT table. I started finding the old backup of the database, to restore the post and realized it is almost 3 years old. Cant believe how fast times goes by. But after reading the very interesting post from Waldo about their new tool ReVision i came to think of this old post. (unfortunately i will not be at Directions in San Diego myself, even though i just live a couple of hours from there! But i hope to get some updates from people seeing the tool demonstrated!).

Basically what the post was about was the features of Rolling Object Table, a feature that allows Windows programs to publish “interfaces” to some of it internal features – i dont know it this is the correct description of it though :). Dynamics NAV is exposing some methods to read/write objects through the client, as well as querying forms and getting other data from the client. Since my original post, there has been quite a few additional blogs featuring the technology. We (see kudos section at the bottom) were playing around with the .NET Reflector tool, and used it on one of Celenia Version Controls dll’s. I had the same features as used in the Developers Toolkit for importing/exporting objects from the running client.

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Sep 22

Yet another…! As a regular Dynamics NAV blog reader i am sure you have seen this before, in various flavors, but here is a simple yet powerful splash screen. The main purpose of this splash screen, has been to easily identify development, test and live database configurations, and also show information about the current object version in the database.

Download the object from the download section, and see this quick tutorial on how to check for various parameters used in the splash screen, such as:

  • Compare current database name with live database name, to identify live database
  • Show custom version tag
  • Show warning for modified objects

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Jul 18

I recently got the test credentials for the Saasplaza RTC testdrive that i have blogged about earlier (App-V streaming of Dynamics NAV) and decided today to give it a quick spin. Along with the install there is a great installation guide for the software that provides very easy to follow step by step installation for both XP and Win7 workstations. I did the Win7 x64 installation, and it took approx. 5 minutes to setup.

Installation is basically

  • downloading the Microsoft Application Virtualization client
  • setup credentials
  • Setup serverinformation
  • Download updates

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Jul 12

Microsoft Office Integration from Dynamics NAV uses stylesheets to transfer data to Excel and Word. If you are on a v5 database or higher this is standard functionality. If you have upgraded your executables, you will notice the new buttons in the toolbar, but nothing happens when you click them. In order to get them working you need to import some new objects, and add a couple of new functions to codeunit 1. The objects are:

  • Form 690: Manage Style Sheets
  • Form 691: Send-to Programs
  • Form 692: Import Style Sheet
  • Form 693: Program Selections
  • Form 694: Style Sheets
  • Codeunit 403: Application Launch Management

Most of this blog entry is really nothing hot of the press, but i found a nice little trick for getting the records inserted into the tables automatically.

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Jul 08

As a NAV developer there are basically only 2 books to live by:

  1. Application Designers Guide
    (Also available in the F1 Online Help in the application)
  2. C/AL Programming Guide
    (Programming-, Naming-, Numbering-conventions in NAV)

These books should be mandatory reading by any developer/person doing development, but real world experience unfortunately shows they aren’t. Even for ISV products you see some scary interesting examples.
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