ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV / Business Central Developer Digest - vol 258

The NAV community, including the ArcherPoint technical staff, is made up of developers, project managers, and consultants who are constantly communicating, with the common goal of  sharing helpful information with one another to help customers be more successful.

As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them on blogs, forums, social media...so everyone can benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this community—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share this great information with everyone who might not have the time to check out the multitude of resources out there? So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from NAV experts and devotees around the world. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.

Base Application Customization: You Can, But You Shouldn’t

I think we’ve discussed this in Dev Digest before, but it bears repeating. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should modify base objects in Dynamics NAV/BC. As Waldo notes in his blog on this topic, with the advent of Extensions in NAV 2016, this is the way of customizing Dynamics NAV/BC…and the only way in the future. If you haven’t embraced moving custom code out of the base code, now is the time. Read Waldo’s blog for a plethora of reasons why you shouldn’t (even though you can) customize AL BaseApp.

How to Tell If an Extension is Installed or Not

Stefano Demiliani suggests using PowerShell to check an Extension’s status in D365BC. Since the Get-NAVAppInfo cmdlet doesn’t provide status information, he provides a PowerShell command that will provide the status of the Extension.

A Cure for Zombie Containers

Freddy provides a cure for zombie Docker containers in this brief post.

Migrating Help Files to Dynamics 365 Business Central

Eva Dupont shares instructions on how to reuse classic help files from Dynamics NAV 2017 or earlier versions and provides three options for moving these classic, object-based Help files to the Dynamics 365 Business Central Help Server.

Educate Yourself on Dynamics 365 Business Central

Saurav Dhyani shares in his post, MSDYN365BC – Self Learning, that Microsoft is continuously adding new features and changes in Business Central and has released a free-for-everyone, self-learning portal. You can customize your learning path and become a more proficient user by accessing the (currently) 28 video tutorials being offered by Microsoft.

How Do You Handle Changes in NAV/BC When an Event Doesn’t Exist?

Suresh Kulla shares practical advice for AL development when you have a scenario where there isn’t an Event to subscribe to when building out modifications…or, even trickier, when you want to exit from a calling function without executing the next line of code. Read How to handle changes in NAV/BC when Event does not Exist? to learn the resolution.

If you are interested in Dynamics NAV and Business Central development, be sure to see our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.

Read the "How To" blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.