kriki: Review:Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015

[Blog bot]

After reading also the other “Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV…”, I was curious about the latest one in the series.

Even if the book is for people starting programming in NAV and I having lots of experience with Navision/NAV (started in 1999), each time I read one of the books I find some things I didn’t know (or did know and forgot about it … ahum).



When I started developing in 1999, I didn’t have the luck to have such a book. I did have a 3-day course in C/AL development but having a book like this would have been a lot better (and cheaper!) to have me started with C/AL.



How should you use the book? Well, definitely not like I did: Reading it by bits and pieces while on the train.

The best way is to first install and prepare NAV2015 on your PC, have a developers license, open the book and start reading and developing and testing. Doing things while you read about it is the best way to learn how to develop!



Some of the parts I like the most:

-”Enter the first field number as 10 (the default is 1), and increment each remaining field number by 10 (the default is 1).” : the defaults are not always the best even if used since the start. It definitely helps being able to put the field “Post Code” near the other address-fields instead of far, far away in another galaxy…

-”INSERT(FALSE);” and not “INSERT;”. “It’s always a good habit to write code explicitly so there is no doubt what the intended action is” : I would call this a no-brainer! Maybe this is the reason I never saw this written before …



And something new I learned (I did learn other [new] things, but this is something I never knew in all this years with C/AL [shame on me!]):

-”RESET function”:” …., and clears all internal variables in the current instance of the record.”. This was something I didn’t know. I always use CLEAR for it. But both have something you need to know to avoid bad surprises: they don’t delete the records in the temptables used inside the current instance of the record!



Definitely a book to read. Even for experienced developers (ok, YOU can read it on the train…).



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