Implementing Dynamics NAV 2013

The release of the book Implementing Dynamics NAV 2013 has just been announced. The book will be available on March 2013.

I’m very proud of this announcement because I wrote the book ;-) , along with my sister, friend and colleague: Cristina Nicolàs.

After 1 year of hard work we have had good and also hard moments. But seeing that finally the book is a reality makes me very proud.

You can pre-order the book in the Packt Publishing web: http://www.packtpub.com/implementing-microsoft-dynamics-nav-2013/book.

The book will be available in hard copy, and also in different electronic formats like epub, kindle or pdf.

Salut!
Laura Nicolàs

NAV 2013: Small big changes on field’s length

As Vjekoslav said on his blog NavigateIntoSucces, in Dynamics NAV 2013 some fields have grown from 30 to 50 characters. It may seem silly, but this brutal limitation has given more than one headache to companies using Dynamica NAV.

In previous versions some field’s length had already grown to 50 characters, like customers and vendors names. But item or G/L accounts were left with their meager 30 characters.

Now, with Dynamics NAV 2013, all “Description” and “Name” fields have now 50 characters. Description of Items, Variant, Payment Methods, Fixed Assets, Item Categories, Inventory Periods, etc. Up to 160 “Description” or “Name” fields have grown with Dynamics NAV 2013.

Other length changes:

- The “Your reference” field found on document’s header goes from 30 to 35 characters.

- Fields like “External Document No.”, “Vendor Order Nº”, “Vendor Invoice No.”, etc. goes from 20 to 35.

- “User ID” fields goes from 20 to 50.

- The “Customer Discount Code” field goes from 10 to 20.

Salut!

Laura Nicolàs

Dynamics NAV 2013 has a new debugger

Dynamics NAV has a new debugger, and good news are that you can debug RTC sessions and also sessions from any other client (like a WebService).

The previous version of Dynamics NAV, versión 2009, already had an option to debug C# sessions... but an incomprehensible C# code was shown. Many of the Dynamics NAV developers (as myself) where unable to underestand it. So if we needed to debug, we tried to reproduce the process on the classic client to be able to debug C/AL code.

The classic client has been droped from Dynamics NAV. Good new then that the new debugger shows C/AL code! In addition, it includes cool features, like conditional breakpoints, breaking on record changes, or skip code from codeunit 1.

Start the debugger

You must start the debugger from the Dynamics NAV Development Environment (AKA the classic client. You will still use it to develop on the C/SIDE environment).
From there click Tools , Debugger, Debug Session. A page will open, showing all active sessions. You will be able to select the session you want to debug from any user and any client.

Once you have selected the session click the Debug option. If you want to debug a session that is not on the list, you can also use the Debug Next option. It will debug the next session connecting to the server. This is a great feature to debug WebServices for instance.

And the debugger opens... aulthough no code is shown on yet!

As the message says, the debugger is Waiting for break.

You have two options to force the break:
1. Place a breakpoint on an object statement and wait until the sessions reaches that statement.
2. Click the Break option to debug from the point where the session is right now.

And now the debugger is on

In future posts I will give more details about the new debugger.

Salut!
Laura Nicolàs

My debut in the blogging world

As a consultant / developer of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Also known as Navision),
I often had to resort to technical blogs or forums to help me solve an issue.

No doubt that all those experts virtual communities are an important tool for anyone working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV: end users, junior or senior developers.
Last year I started a new blog since there was almost no information about Navision written in Spanish (besides the tipsdbits community [http://www.tipsdbits.com/]).
Technical people is used to that, but not the average NAV end user. In fact my idea is not to write a fantastic tech blog, since there are really good ones out there which I follow, but to write a more end-user orienteted blog.

I decided now to start translating all my posts. Maybe this way I will improve my english skills ;)

Salut!
Laura Nicolàs