One difficulty in dealing with the AL programming language across Dynamics NAV 2018, Business Central 13/14 and now BC 15 is the AL extension. I’ve found that disabling and re-enabling them as you switch back and forth between projects gets to be difficult to manage and it has unpredictable results if you don’t restart VS Code. Its not possible to work on any different mix of AL projects at the same time.

Creating a self contained “portable” install of VS Code solves these issues.

I’m able to have version .12 (NAV 2018), current 3.0 (BC 14.x) and the new 4.0 (BC 15.x) extension in different VS Code installs and not get any of the bizzare behavior switching back and forth would produce.

The zip doesn’t support auto-update but this is a small inconvenience.

Instructions on creating a portable installer. code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/portable

So in short, go to the download page. https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

Download the zip

Extract the zip and add a “Data” folder.

Now install or copy your extensions!

This blog was just migrated from WordPress to GitHub Pages. It uses a GitHub repo forked from the Jekyll Now https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now repo and markdown.

This setup with GitHub Pages is so less complicated (from my standpoint!) than where it started; self-hosted ASP.NET, joomla then WordPress, finally hosted WordPress. Maintaining WordPress was just way overboard for this blog.

The publishing flow follows my work workflows. Git repo, commit, push, build and deploy. Markdown is also becoming the basis for everything documentation so I found the whole solution to be perfect.

Comments? Open up an issue!

https://github.com/eknraw/eknraw.github.io/issues

I’ve had dual monitors in good use since 2011. Two workhorse 24” Samsung 1920 x 1200 resolution monitors to be exact. They were a huge improvement over my single 20” 4:3 ratio monitor they replaced. Yet, I always wished I could get a little more vertical space, due to the nature of the code editing I was doing.

Check out my post at my ArcherPoint blog: http://www.archerpoint.com/blog/Posts/nav-2015-column-indenting-and-disabling-interactive-sorting

Check out my post at my ArcherPoint blog: http://www.archerpoint.com/blog/Posts/attention-nav-developers-shortcuts-can-be-good-thing

Check out my post at my ArcherPoint blog: http://www.archerpoint.com/blog/Posts/dynamics-nav-web-service-error-%E2%80%9Cindex-was-outside-bounds-array%E2%80%9D

Check out my post at my ArcherPoint blog: http://www.archerpoint.com/blog/Posts/nav-objects-nav-2013-nav-2015-powershell-commendlets

I’ve updated my SQL Reporting Services and Dynamics NAV Option Strings solution to version v2.00.00 which will work with 2013.  Updated some of the code/syntax (which was quite ugly looking at it years later) and updated the report from classic, with an RDL layout. [embed]https://github.com/eknraw/SSRS-Dynamics-NAV-Option-Strings[/embed]

In two previous posts SQL Reporting Services and Dynamics NAV Option Strings: Part 1 and SQL Reporting Services and Dynamics NAV Option Strings: Part 2 I created a way to enable option string values to be used with SQL Reporting Services. I’ve removed the links and moved the solution up to Github: https://github.com/eknraw/SSRS-Dynamics-NAV-Option-Strings Open to updates from anyone.  I’ll migrate to 2013/2013 R2 as I have time.

Check out my post over at ABC Computers: http://www.abc-computers.com/news-events/blog/error-while-renaming-a-company-or-field-in-the-dynamics-nav-2013-development-environment-here-is-a-solution/

Check out my post over at ABC Computers: http://www.abc-computers.com/news-events/blog/is-a-dynamics-nav-2013-page-based-on-a-sql-view-not-updating-to-reflect-the-latest-data-changes-heres-a-solution/

Check out my post over at ABC Computers: http://www.abc-computers.com/news-events/blog/cant-run-the-windows-client-rtc-or-debugger-from-the-dynamics-nav-2013-development-environment-this-may-be-why/

In SQL Reporting Services and Dynamics NAV Option Strings: Part 1 we created a table and a processing report in Dynamics NAV that would enable us to later access every Dynamics NAV option string value in a SQL Reporting Services report.  Now, I will show how I handled the query to get option string values into an SSRS report.  This is a little less complex than Part 1. :) With all the steps of Part 1 complete, we now need a simple and consistent way to query for those values.  I solved this problem by created a User Defined Function in my database. Which looks like:

One downside to using SQL reporting services with Dynamics NAV versus a NAV report or another 3rd party solution such as Jet Reports (jet uses C/FRONT to access option values, flowfields, etc. which gets these values directly from NAV) is that you lose the access to the Option String values and instead are forced to deal with the integer values assigned by NAV to each string value at the SQL level.

I’m frequently creating new databases in NAV.  One annoyance was NAV’s insistence on the default file location.  In my dev environment this was always where I had installed SQL.   Not where I want my databases. I spent some time investigating and after watching file system and registry access on both server and client I wasn’t able to see it grab any relevant values from those spots.  From what I can tell after watching packets between client and server with a packet sniffer, the NAV client is parsing the file location from the sp_helpfile stored procedure.  The solution?  NAV is essentially following the Master database. How to move system databases in SQL Server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345408.aspx Just move the Master database to the spot you’d like the default file locations. Now when I specify Database Files… Yay! The only downside is that is also will want to put the Transaction Log Files in the same file path.  Small price to pay. :)   Does anyone else have a better way of doing this?  It would at least be nice if NAV could somehow use the default file locations specified within SQL.

Not sure where I originally saw this tip but it’s been so handy for me I think it needs to exist in more than one location.  If you’ve done a NAV backup and need to grab a couple objects out of the backup, instead of doing a full restore and then exporting select objects, you can point the object designer import process at the .fbk backup file. NAV will scan through and present a list of conflicting objects, which should be all objects.  Skipping the full restore is a HUGE time saver. Shift + F12 to open object designer.  File -> Import.  You’ll have to change the file type to ‘All Files (.)’. It’ll scan through the .fbk and present the Import Worksheet.