Directions EMEA 2019 Afterthoughts
Oct11

Directions EMEA 2019 Afterthoughts

It seems that when my blog posts appear some people hold their breath. Don’t worry, that won’t be nessesairy this time. I am at the Vienna airport and just wanted to write some thoughts I have after the event. When I look at 2.500 people wondering around I don’t see a community. I see individuals. We call it a community because we share the love of a product but we need to move to the… Continue Reading Mark...

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Tip #62 | “Where-Used” in Visual Studio Code
Oct02

Tip #62 | “Where-Used” in Visual Studio Code

The “Where-Used” in Visual Studio Code is nice, but not always productive. Today I wanted to see where a field was used and came up with an alternative I wanted to share. ObsoleteState If you mark a field ObsoleteState::Pending the compile will throw warnings everywhere the field is used. This allows you to quickly use the error window to jump through the code and check whatever you want… Continue Reading Mark...

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What if…
Sep22

What if…

Sometimes I can be a bit emotional when it comes to changes in the software product I work with on a daily bases. An example of that was my previous blog that I took offline in order to do some editing making it less about emotion and more about facts. The emotion is probably justified for a few reasons of which most the fact that Navision, NAV, Business Central (I stopped caring about the… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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How Do I – Prevent an epic clusterfuck…
Sep17

How Do I – Prevent an epic clusterfuck…

Now that the NDA on Business Central Wave II has been lifted and the DVD preview is released partners got time to look at the code Microsoft has refactored. The reactions vary from being marketing correct to more realistic. I have a strong opinion about what Microsoft did, and especially how they did it. First of all, I agree that it’s a great idea to split NAV up into modules and I… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Working with Azure Blob and NAV
Sep16

Working with Azure Blob and NAV

This is something that’s long overdue, I wanted to write this before my summer vacation. My reason for holding back is that I want to share all the code for this project and this needs cleaning up. This is still not done and if you want the code you’ll have to contact me. Why am I still writing this? I am actually writhing this from the “International” airport of Cork Ireland where I… Continue Reading...

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Tip #61 | .gitignore for AL projects
Sep11

Tip #61 | .gitignore for AL projects

The Business Central Community loves Git, but GitHub does not seem to even know we exist. It recognises our projects as perl projects and there is no suggestion for a .gitignore file. Why .gitignore? It’s generally considered best practice to use Git for managing uncompiled code, but not to store the result of a project, nor it’s dependencies. Also, settings that may vary from… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Tip #60 | Suppress Warnings in Visual Studio Code
Sep11

Tip #60 | Suppress Warnings in Visual Studio Code

One of the most anoying things about writing AL code in Visual Studio Code is getting warnings that you cannot fix. Simply impossible. My “favorite” warning is this one For almost a decade it’s been possible to sort on flowfields from code and in reports and in most cases it works fine. On larger datasets it might require a covering index for performance. This warning is a joke… Continue Reading Mark...

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Tip #59 | Multiple Start Configurations in Visual Studio Code
Sep11

Tip #59 | Multiple Start Configurations in Visual Studio Code

When developing extensions for Business Central you have a wide array of publishing options to choose from. My most used options when working on the ForNAV Customizable Report Pack are our Sandbox and Docker. Testing is best on the Sanxbox for two reasons. First because all the Azure Active Directory stuff actually returns something which is useful for licensing scenario’s. Second… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Episode 4 – BC Fall Release | Give Feedback
Aug26

Episode 4 – BC Fall Release | Give Feedback

Feedback is critical for Microsoft to improve Business Central and all of their other products. For this reason a preview is published of the upcomming release this fall. You can install this using Docker and I’ve been told a DVD will be made available soon. This release will be the biggest change since the introduction of the Three Tier model and Role Tailored Client and fits into the… Continue Reading Mark...

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Episode 3 – BC Fall Release | Finding Stuff
Aug25

Episode 3 – BC Fall Release | Finding Stuff

UPDATE!! Microsoft is listening!! Big news, it seems that Microsoft is fixing the issues we’ve found in our App for AppSource. Both the functions on the TempBlob and the Language table will be added back! But also, let’s continue where we left off with the previous episodes because there are more challenges that won’t be fixed. Let’s see if we can fix some reference problems. Before… Continue Reading Mark...

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Episode 2 – BC-Fall Release Wave II | Checking Your Extension
Aug15

Episode 2 – BC-Fall Release Wave II | Checking Your Extension

Before we dive into the list of (breaking) changes that I’ve discovered so far, I will first explain how to check your extension against the preview of the fall release. This is mostly interesting for those who are on AppSource or partners who have refactored their IP into On Prem extensions. I’m going to assume all of them have access to the Ready to Go program. If not, send me a message… Continue Reading Mark...

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Episode I – BC-Fall Release Wave II | The Upgrade Dream Shattered
Aug14

Episode I – BC-Fall Release Wave II | The Upgrade Dream Shattered

Be careful what you ask for, you might actually get it. This phrase illustrates what we will see when Microsoft releases Business Central Wave II this October where C/Side is removed in favor of Visual Studio Code, The Windows Client discontinued in favor of the Web Interface and the old Navision application is broken into two parts and very heavy refactoring has taken place. For years,… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Opinion – What will happen in fall with Business Central
Jul12

Opinion – What will happen in fall with Business Central

As far as I remember, social media around Business Central/NAV(ision) has never been as quiet as in the last months. There is nothing from the MVP’s anymore and it seems the majority of partners are in the dark about that’s going on at Microsoft. While this is true, Microsoft is updating the GitHub with the new AL foundation periodically with new code but without explaining the strategy…. Continue Reading Mark...

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Meta UI Control Add-Ins for Business Central, how and why…
Jul03

Meta UI Control Add-Ins for Business Central, how and why…

Today we’ve successfully completed a workshop at Vos Transport with Global Mediator where we did a demo/prototype of a new user interface defined on metadata embedded in Microsoft Dynamics NAV using client add-ins. We’ve been working on preparing this workshop for over 12 months and I am very happy and proud of the result. Client Add-Ins Within Microsoft Dynamics NAV, client… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Extending Role Centers
Jul01

Extending Role Centers

There should be a simple rule that applies to all members of our community. If you struggle with something and find out the answer, then share it. If everyone starts doing that I’m sure it will improve our community and bring back some joy in the world were even most MVP’s just blog so sell their marketing messages. Again, today I wasted much valuable time of my life chasing weird behaviour… Continue Reading Mark...

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Extensions | An item with the same key has already been added
Jun28

Extensions | An item with the same key has already been added

If you work with Extensions in Dynamics NAV there is a fair chance that you’ve seen this message. Today I got it again, waisted half an hour of my live and decided to blog about it. What happened is that I have a Page Extension with the same variable name as already exists in my C/Side page. I’m working with NAV2018 CU17 and the compiler did not complain about this and the publishing… Continue Reading Mark...

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‘Codeunit’ does not contain a definition for… (AL0132)
Jun25

‘Codeunit’ does not contain a definition for… (AL0132)

Today I got this error message while publishing an extension to our Development system. Since our Development system just moved to Azure last week our Azure Specialist and I spent some time troubleshooting this. As always with these things the root cause was not in Azure SQL, but in my C/AL code in C/Side. Our database is hybrid and what I did is removing a codeunit. This was a cleanup… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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C/SIDE Development 101 #12 – Closing session – YouTube

In this webinar we close the C/Side development with stories and anektotes from two decades of C/Side and see where we are today source

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C/SIDE Development 101 #11 – C/AL – Useful system and application functions – YouTube

Both the system (platform) and the application have tons of very useful functions. This sessions will shed light on a number of them illustrated by various code examples. Book: Chapter 7 & 9 Presenter: Peter Wijntjes Moderator: Rob Sanchez source

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Programming Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – Sixth Edition | Mark Brummel Blog

It’s a wrap. After 9 months of work the latest edition of the programming book is finished. This is the sixth edition but the first to be AL only. A very specific choice that I made when I started on the project. And a bit of a gamble since I was unsure how long C/Side would last when we started. When you buy the book you will recognise the script and programming examples. This is… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article...

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C/AL to AL, but better & faster | Mark Brummel Blog

At the airport of Copenhagen (CPH) eating my favorite burger. (Aamanns Burger). Then writing a blog. This is an awkward blog, a blog that was asked for by my colleague Jan when I spent a few days at our office. He asked if I could blog something about converting from C/AL to AL with the ForNAV converter based on the series of blogs by Freddy. (

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Eternal Refactoring | Are you ready? | Mark Brummel Blog

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the best and most customizable ERP that ever existed. There, you have it. For some people it’s hard to understand that in one blog I am trying to protect our ecosystem from loosing C/Side and in the next I am praising Business Central to be miles better than any other cloud ERP. The reason is honesty and reflection. If you don’t… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on their...

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Why C/Side will last another decade… at least… | Mark Brummel Blog

The move by Microsoft from C/Side to Visual Studio Code is a bit like Brexit. At first everybody thinks it is a great idea, until they realise the consequences. And then there is no way back. Why? Please let me explain… With C/Side we have issues, everybody knows that and these issues have to be solved. Issues like integration with source code management and other issues like…… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on...

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C/SIDE Development 101 #10 – C/AL – How to access the data – YouTube

In Dynamics NAV, being a database application, a substantial part of our coding is about accessing this database. Retrieving and updating the data. What are the typical methods and coding patterns to achieve that? Presenter : Luc van Vugt Moderator : David Singleton source

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Converting from C/Side to AL – Dynamics 365 Business Central – YouTube

In this webinar we will show two use cases of converting from C/Side to AL. It;s full of tips and pointers. We also address the differences between the ForNAV converter and the standard Microsoft tooling. source

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C/SIDE Development 101 #9 – C/AL – How to write C/AL – YouTube

Now that you know where “C/AL is hiding”, this session will take a little bit more formal approach on how to write C/AL: the syntax. Book: Chapter 6 & 7 Presenter: René Brummel Moderator: David Singleton source

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Convert Dynamics NAV C/Side to AL for Business Central Extensions – YouTube

With the 100% free converter from ForNAV you can convert from Any version of Dynamics NAV 3-tier to Business Central directly from C/Side without any hassle. Download for free from www.fornav.com source

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C/SIDE Development 101 #8 – C/AL – Where does C/AL hide – YouTube

In this first webinar on the real coding part of this series we will look at simple code examples and where to put them in the different objects. source

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Real life experiences with Per Tenant Extensions – Business Central – YouTube

In this webinar Dmitry Katson explains the learnings from working with per tenant extensions in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central source

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Xliff Compare & Finding Missing Translations | Mark Brummel Blog

When working with Extensions I would not recommend working with Xliff files unless you design for AppSource. Otherwise CaptionML will work fine for Per-Tenant projects. Unfortunately for me, I am working right now on submitting an AppSource project and I need to evaluate if my translations are complete. As I explained at my presentation in Antwerp at NAVTechDays we continue to code… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article...

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Compiling a 2000+ Objects Extension | Mark Brummel Blog

Let’s start diving into working with Extensions in Real Life. I have a lot to blog about and at first I thought I would blog about a very small extension but I’m sure you’ve all seen that. At NAVTechDays I showed you the extension I created with the ForNAV converter that resulted in 2149 files which compiles and executes. I made the extension work on Business Central OnPrem,… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on...

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Blogging & “The Gap” | Mark Brummel Blog

A little over a week ago I attended the Dutch Dynamics Community again, for the first time in a while. It was good to catch up and exchange news with peers in my network. “You’ve been quiet Mark!” is what I’ve been told a few times and that’s true. For some time I try to be quiet and focus on things that are more personal like being a dad of five now and trying to manage the… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on...

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NAVTechDays 2018 | Muppet Show – YouTube

Waldo & Vjeko opening their session with the Muppets show. Great performance. Recorded by Tino Ruijs. source

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Symbols of madness | Mark Brummel Blog

As you know we have been happily developing extensions for a while now. Every once in a while I blog about some stuff I found out recently but it is mostly smooth sailing at the moment. Today I was stumped though. For some reason my symbols were not loading. I make it a point to always develop extensions on a standard NAV2018 database (our current version, move to BC on prem is planned but… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Execute a PATCH call from an Extension by using AL and HttpClient | Mark Brummel Blog

If you work with REST APIs, you already know that you’ve two HTTP methods for updating resources: PUT: updates an entire resource PATCH: the update request only needs to contain the changes to the resource, not the complete resource. The AL language permits you to work with REST services by using the HttpClientclass. If you declare an HttpClient object in AL, from Intellisense in Visual… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Dynamics 365 Business Central October release | Mark Brummel Blog

Long time no see. I’m currently on vacation and finally found some time for writing. I don’t know if you already read Business Applications Release Notes – October ’18. If you are, don’t read this article :). But if you didn’t already read, you can get some basic overview what we will get in October. First one technical news, from October we can use Business Central, on-cloud,… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on...

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Three ways to use extension data in C/Side | Mark Brummel Blog

So, I get it now. We need to develop in extensions. Nothing but extensions. We need to tell our employers to forget about new requirements for half a year and ignore bugs while we developers lock ourselves in the basement and rework our existing code to an extension. Right? Well, locking developers in a basement will probably appeal to a fair number of managers. Not developing new… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article...

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Continuous Integration with Dynamics NAV 2016 and beyond – YouTube

Continuous integration (CI) was introduced in 1994 and since that time has evolved from concept to almost precondition for professional development. For many development environments, the tooling has now evolved so far that a CI project is set up in no time. The CI concepts are also applicable for Dynamics NAV, but require more effort. In this session we make clear what CI is, why CI is important, what is needed and how you could...

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C/Side – Design Patterns Master Class for Microsoft Dynamics NAV – Part II – YouTube

In the second part we will dive into design patterns such as the No. Series, Address Formatting and usage of the Singleton. Enjoy. source

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Dynamics NAV in the Cloud or ‘On premise’ – YouTube

Is your Dynamics NAV hosted on-premise or in the cloud? Microsoft and its partners talk about ‘Digital Transformation’ to convince you that the cloud is inescapable. But is that really what you organization needs? Are there better options? To find an answer to these questions Rick Blom of EasyStep2 has been invited to do a webinar on this topic. He will show you the pros and cons and discuss: Costs, benefits and ROI Performance and...

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C/Side – Design Patterns Master Class for Microsoft Dynamics NAV – Part I – YouTube

This series of video’s teaches you to apply design patterns to C/AL development in C/Side. Thanks to Liberty Grove Software for sharing this video. source

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Converting an ISV solution to an extension: Update 1 | Mark Brummel Blog

Well, what can I say……….this is going to take a while. ? If you have no idea what I am talking about, start here. After getting the objects converted to AL (using the standard process documented here), I was immediately greeted in VS Code by just over 8000 errors/warnings. Great start. Luckily half of those were generated by the code analyzers. If you don’t know what they are,… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on...

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Converting an ISV solution to an extension: The Beginning | Mark Brummel Blog

I’ve been a bit neglectful of this blog for the past couple of months, but with good reason. I’ve been jumping around multiple projects, and have now landed on a project that will involve taking a roughly 3000 object ISV solution and converting it to an extension. Easy task? Far from it.Challenging? Most definitely……but that’s why we do what we do right!?Will I be able to convert… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on...

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C/Side Development #6 – Reports – YouTube

In this episode of C/Side development Claus Lundstrom explains how to get started with Reports in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. source

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Record Zoom Extension | Mark Brummel Blog

I think we all like the Zooming in the classic client and the Help/ About This Page in the Role Tailored client. This extension I created can be easily added to any page that displays records from the database and it will show all fields included in the source table. The source code is available on Github. Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s Article on their blog

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C/SIDE Development 101 #5 – Field – keys, SIFT and more – YouTube

In this session David Singleton explains Fields, Keys and SIFT for Microsoft Dynamics NAV source

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Extending Role Centers | Mark Brummel Blog

Today I wanted to extend a Role Center with a Page Extension and I noticed Microsoft has updated terminology. To add a list to the Home Items you must use Embedding. Other changes: Related Information = Navigation New = Creation. The Result in the Windows Client is the normal behavior with grouping the Cue from the Activities which in this case was also created using a Table Extension… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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The FOB is planning its retirement | Mark Brummel Blog

In software we’ve invented all kinds of terminology to make it sound as if removing a feature is great. Terms like sunsetting and retirement give you a great feeling. Who does not love to see the sun go down with a beer and a loved one. In reality it means that software that once was is no longer and we’ve had plenty of that in our beloved Navision product, now referred to as Business… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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Move Bespoke Symbols to Production | Mark Brummel Blog

Today I had a small talk with my brother about generating custom symbols from C/Side and how to manage that. Here is how I did it. At the company I work for we have a DTAP environment and we (normally) only code in Development. Fobs and Extensions are moved from Development to Test, Acceptance and Production. The quesion is how to control your symbols and move them together with each… Continue Reading Mark Brummel’s...

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GDPR and Dynamics NAV – YouTube

Implementation of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an organization-specific process. To prevent a scattergun approach is used, it is important to use a targeted approach that suits your organization and is focused on Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Arno Mouwen takes you into the new European privacy legislation and explains what you have to be taken into account in general and with regard to Dynamics NAV specifically. On the basis...

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