Tech Ed 2006: Daily report and NAV 5.0 details

Marije_Brummel

Hi,

I am currently at TechEd 2006.

Since I am here as part of the MVP program, it seams only fair to all of you to ask if there are any questions I can ask to the pro's here or try to find out. O:) , Since being a MVP is the result of all of your questions.

I will be working as part of the staffing of the Dynamics part.

More information about TechEd

http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/default.mspx

ara3n

When will a beta version be available for NSC's?
As you mentioned the 3 tiered system, how does it effect our programming?

Will we get a better text editor for the development environment?
.NET and COM integration, what has improved?
Error, exception handling, have they done anything about it.

Report writer, what has changed?

Scheduling, have you build something about it. For example to schedule to run a report a certain time and email it to somebody.

Licensing, has anything changed? paying 200 dollars for a table is terrible. If you tell this to a .NET developer they'll laugh at you.

Running business logic outside of navision? Can we do that?

Marije_Brummel

ara3n wrote:

Scheduling, have you build something about it. For example to schedule to run a report a certain time and email it to somebody.

I have made small change to the job scheduler, enabling it to run thue the NAS. Is actualy is the scheduler form in a singleinstance codeunit with a timer trigger in it.

Maybe I'll post it to the download section when I get back to Holland.

Marije_Brummel

Tech Ed Update Sunday

We had a mvp meeting today. My first international one. It is realy great seeing all of these gurus getting together. 8)

It actualy felt a little strange being between all of these visual studio/sql and windows expert. Dynamics is realy a different type of sports. O:)

We had a presentation by Sean O’Driscoll telling eveyone how great the MVP program is. And it is. =D>

Only thing is when he mentioned, 'when you are a mvp'. I do nog recognise myself into that. Acutaly the mvp-girls, April and Melissa congratulated me on having a social life, instead of 12 computers at my house. 8-[

After that we had some roundtable sessions, but not much dynamics stuff was mentioned, but I might got a change of aranging some stuff for the mvp program concerning Dynamics in the future. [NDA]

At 5:30 we had a staff meeting for the dynamics guys. Unfortunately the Navision guys are flying in late so I will be meeting them tomorrow.

After that we had the keynotes. This was a realy great show with some of the microsoft top gurus telling all about where microsoft is heading and how important we are, stuff like that. \:D/

I'll keep you all informed about how things are evolving here. Tomorrow is the real start.

I am not realy into the blogging stuff since it is very timeconsuming. You might want to have a look at this website.

http://techedbloggers.net
Best,

Marq.

ara3n

I watched the live event of the keynote. I think the hostes from the show 24 kept it entertaining.

Oh something else I found today that is amazing is MSDN virtual servers where you can get 90 min free access like terminal services to most MS software. I tried SQL 2005. It is great. http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs

Marije_Brummel

Monday Update,

Today was the real start of the TechEd. I met most of the Navision crew today. I is realy great meating up with all of these guys after 7 or 8 years of Navision developing.

Today started off with a strategic biefing about the dynamics brand. There was loads of stuff about the CRM 3.0 version and the AX 4.0 version but the thing I liked most was the preview about the new generic Dynamics Client first being adopted in NAV 5.0 next year.

It realy looks great. Especialy when running on a Vista client.

Anyone got a look at Vista. There is a lot going on at this TechEd about Vista and Office 12.

Going back to the NAV 5.0 Client.

Much of the stuff today under NDA will be released at the TechEd tomorrow. To please stay tuned for the update tomorrow.

There were 2 NAV sessions today.

There was the introduction to Dynamics NAV thing. This was a realy nice session when you'd never heard about NAV. Todd told about all the things NAV is about and the dev environment, changing the application layer, stuff like that.

The other session was about tuning NAV for SQL. One of the realy amazing things about this session was the first slide. It was actualy saying; We have a problem running on SQL. But the next slide said; We have the solution. It was another aproach than the marketing guys take when talking about NAV on SQL without any problems.

There was a presentation about some absolutely realy cool set of tools within NAV enabling the SQL from within the NAV environment instead of the SQL enterprise manager.

This evening I had Demo station duty from 6.30 until 9.00 pm.

It was realy cool having a GP mvp coming to our booth telling: Hey we have a problem with a customer and we cannot solve it in GP.

I told him about NAV about the availability of changing within all of the NAV application and this guy was realy getting entousiastic about NAV instead of GP, saying NAV could solve this problem whereass GP could not.

Also realy a great thing was that half of the NAV team from denmark were waching me explaining it to this guy while biulding half of the solutoin in NAV during the conversation. It was realy great getting compliments of the NAV team about modifying NAV while taling to a 'customer'

After that there was a AX developer asking about the difference between NAV and AX. I told him about the difference in adoptability. I showed him how easily NAV can be changed and modified to your business needs. And he got realy entousiastic about NAV instead of AX.

Next to that there was a dinner with all of the NAV TechEd crew. It was a realy great opportunity meeting with all of these guys.

All together is was a great day.

Tomorrow is THE presentation about NAV 5.0

Best,

Mark.

PS. I am a bit dissapointed about the replies to this thread. If you have any replies please post them, even if they are smiley post.
Please remember that I am on a realy tight scedule on this event. I only have about 10 to 15 minutes a day to get you guys updated about what is going on here. The days here start at 6am and stop about 11pm and you have to catch some sleep inbetween.

kine

Thanks for the info, it seems like you are not just good developer, but good salesman too :-). I am thinking about participating on Europe TechEd, but still I do not know...

I wish you many exciting experiences...

Luc_VanDyck

Mark Brummel wrote:

Monday Update,

Great article you wrote here, Mark. Keep up the good work. =D>

HalMdy

Mark Brummel wrote:

Tomorrow is THE presentation about NAV 5.0

Waiting for this !!!


Thx Mark for the job, it's like we are all together in the States ... =D>

Kowa

Thanks for keeping us informed. I just hope NAV 5.0 receives a better quality management than 4.0SP2 :roll:

ara3n

Keep posting. Thank you.

The other session was about tuning NAV for SQL. One of the realy amazing things about this session was the first slide. It was actualy saying; We have a problem running on SQL. But the next slide said; We have the solution. I

What are/were they?

There was a presentation about some absolutely realy cool set of tools within NAV enabling the SQL from within the NAV environment instead of the SQL enterprise manager.

What kind of tools?

DenSter

I am really jealous.... I wish I could be there....

Excellent article Mark, thanks for keeping us posted. I want to know more about the web services capabilities.

kine

If you want to know more about the webservices, see my last blog entry. It is good example how to create some webservice now... I know, that NAV 5.0 will have another tools for that, but.. :-)

Savatage

getting people into nav from GP & AX - you might have a future in sales

Balello

I'm waiting the NAV 5.0 presentation... and I can't wait!! If only I was there..... Give us feedback, do it for us all!

[-o<

Marije_Brummel

I've converted all of this into a BLOG thing on the http://dynamicsusers.org/ site.

I will be upkeeping both this tread and the blog.

40 minutes to go to the 5.0 session.

Savatage

8)

Marije_Brummel

Tuesday update,

Wow, I just do not know where to start.

I guess most of you guys want me to start at all of the NAV 5.0 stuff.

I won't

Today started out real quetly. I arrived at the convention round 8. Got some breakfest and about 3 cups of coffee and atteded some SQL session about what is being new in the 2005 verison.

After that there was a session about the NAV conection with .net. Basicly just showing some stuff making timesheet posting in the job ledger entries available from outlook though a .net ADO connection, having the NAS cathing the business logic.

I might be able to update the objects in NAV as well as the .net VSTO objects in outlook to Luc to post to the download selection.

After this session I had lunch with some of the NAV crew attending at this event.

Before the 5.0 session I was able to catch a session about Sharepoint server 2007. It is realy a great product, and considering 2007 version can get data out in into a SQL database it realy opens up opportunities for a small set of customers of our NAV product not being completely sattisfied about the userinterface.

But wait until they have seen 5.0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WOWOWOWOWOW It is realy a great user interface.

NAV will be the first product running on the generic Microsoft Dynamics UX 2006.

It is a completely new inteface, rendering data given from the 2nd tier of the 3tier application NAV will be having from the 5.0 version onwards.

Just to make clear first.

NAV developing will be in C/AL in 5.0

The development environment will still be C/AL, and it will remain that way until a similar development environment has been found when it gets to easy adoptobility.

We will actualy get another objecttype, called Page, like the XML and PANE objects in 4.0. This will enable you to create the pages the NAV 5.0 client will use to render for the user interface.

All of the current forms will be available into the pages thing. And we will be able to add all kinds of fancy stuff like graphs, COM add-ons like Word, Excel, Mappoint and things like that.

One of the things realy cleared out on me when looking at the 5.0 client is the Infopanes in the 4.0 client. In the 5.0 client, they are separate things within your page enabling users to get information about the e.g. sales header or sales line records without going into the table related forms and stuff like that.

In fact, that will be the biggest change in user experience in NAV 5.0 Whereass in the 'old' 4.0 client you are used to go to 5 or 6 or 7 other forms to get to the detailed data, in 5.0 the detailed data is presented within the Infopanes.

This is also where the new user based model snapps in. You can define user roles and this enables you to make the application more userfriendly for the enduser not being conserned about the bits of the application they do not use.

One of the great impovements that conserns this is the removing of the tab-oriented forms. The new forms are just big forms containing all data with a kind of bar instead of the tab of which I forgotten the name from they gave to it, I'll post the name tomorrow.

The great thing about this improvement is that you will be able to remove information from this form using the user role, lets say e.g. a user do not need to know about the purchasing part of an Item, this information is not shown at the form, rather than having to make a new form for a different user we are doing today.

Going onwards to the 3tier thingy.

In the new situation the business logic will be executed at some 2tier layer running on IIS Server. I am not realy into the technical thing whereass it conserns this subject, but maybe someone else can explain about that being good or bad.

I do not think it is the same thing as the AX programm is running on, it is specialy designed for NAV.

I think I could just go on and on about the NAV 5.0 client but I also want to catch some sleep...

The demo about the client should be available for downloading in a couple of days, or otherwise I'll get it to be here someway.

If there are any questions about this subject, please post them so I can try to answer it.

Last thing I want to inform you about is that we had a bowling event with the whole dynamic team including GP, AX, CRM etc, and visitors invited at the TechEd. I did not realy got a high score but it was a nice event when it gets to meeting people.

That is it for today,

I hope that it is somewhat satisfactional whereass it conserns the NAV 5 thing. If you have any questions, please post.

Either I can try to answer them or any of the other mvp's because the demo we've been getting today was mostly the same thing we got to see 2 months ago as part of the mvp programm, so the NDA thingy is removed from that subject. [not from the webservices thing!]

One last thing, if you want to tryout 5.0 client, just drop by our demo stand at the teched, you are allowed to play with it !!!

I think it is the you last chance, 3 days left.... O:)

I don't know if there is a chance to play with it at the partner conference.

Best,

Mark

kine

:-) I am happy that the NDA is removed from the things... :-)

Yes, the new "pages" will be very good, but from another point of view, you will need big screen with good resolution to see the info without using scrollbars... ;-)

And there is big chance to customize the look, add new components etc. Of course, we need to be prepared to total change of licensing policy, because I assume that it will not be possible keep this "per object licensing" when the 2nd tier will be running on IIS...

DenSter

damn dude.... we saw that stuff back in October and we were not allowed to say anything about it.... it's good to finally be able to talk about it, now that it is public. I'll still try to keep to things I've heard MSFT people talk about in public though.

The IIS thing is the "Navision Service Tier", although I'm sure that there will be an official name for it. It will run as managed .NET code on IIS. The database is in one place (native or SQL Server, although MSFT is developing on SQL now, and native will go away at some point). Then the display target is either the new client or the old client. You get to choose this yourself, so that existing add-ons and verticals will still work in NAV 5. The display target is supposed to only be used for display purposes. The business logic will reside in the service tier on IIS, although I don't exactly know how that will work with the old client. I've seen a few demos now, and the people giving the demos were not technical enough to explain that part, they just had a cool looking demo .

That's about all the details I know about it. Basically, by running on IIS, it makes it possible to expose methods and properties to other managed code, using the IIS platform. Hey wait a minute... isn't that where webservices live? I guess we're not allowed to talk about that yet though, so I'll save that for later.

On one hand I like that we get to put everything (including graphics like graphs and maps and stuff like that) on forms, but on the other hand I also like the tabs that we have now. I can't remember the name either, but it's basically similar to how webparts behave in Sharepoint. You can minimize (hide) an area. There are all these other neat things about the new forms though that I don't know are out of NDA yet, but suffice to say that we'll have lots of new things to play with.

With the new version you will get to choose either the new client or the 'old' client per implementation (although I also heard it will be possible to run both at the same time). If you choose the old client, you will have the same type of forms that we have now in Navision. Obviously you will not have all the cool features if you go that way. If you choose the new client, it will be the .NET winforms client, and that's where the fun starts.

I also want to make clear that development will be in C/AL, NOT Visual Studio. I wish it were differently, but it isn't. There is just too big of an existing customer base for Microsoft to change that. Of course, since it will be managed code, we could try to find the NAV namespaces and use it anyway, but we've already been told that will not be supported by MSFT. That means that we will not get tech support from MS, and they get to change the namespaces without letting us know first, so your apps could stop working from one version to the next.

Man have I been wanting to write about this

Marije_Brummel

Wednesday update,

When reading this, please keep in mind that I am on like my 6th or 7th guiness (payd for by Microsoft).

Actualy one guy told me there is a large Irish community in Boston explaining why the beers here are so great.

---

What can I tell you guys about today.

The NAV sessions are allmost out, we had the last one today.

The first session I got today was about SQL tools. This was a realy great session. There are loads of new analisys tools added to SQL 2005 that could help us NAV guys finding out about all of our performance issues.

I think when all bugs are fixed we realy should actualy have all of our customers on SQL 2005. The tools are great.

After that I attended a CRM session. Just to get to know the product. It is realy a Intenet exporer solution running on webservices, which is realy great for salespeople, but is it realy difficult to get information from different tables in one view, Very much unlike the net NAV 5.0 client where we have information from all around the application rather than having the users go thrue the info form by form.

The realy nice thing about the crm thing is the connection with word using VSTO tools. You can actualy start a word merge from whithin word getting info from the CRM thingy, but also updating information to CRM. Imagine changing the customer name or any other field in word and having it changed in the database, CRM has it! I went to the session together with Stuart, the NAV 5.0 project manager, and he was realy entousiastic about this so don;t be suprised when this will be available in 5.1 or 6.whatever

After that we had some lunch with the NAV people, who are realy giving me the feeling being a member of their team rather than the guy from the MVP program.

The session after lunch was about BizTalk and EDI. It was a realy theoretical session but kind of gives you the idea what the application does.

Then there was the last session for NAV. This was presented by David Studebaker. He owns a company together with is wife and a couple of other folks doing about 1 or 2 upgdades a month.

He did a great presentation about how to appoach a upgrade in NAV and having all kind of tips about best practices. I'll thy to upload the ppt slide tomorrow.

After that got finished I attended a Microsoft Influencer party. First I felt a little alone, not knowing all of these people, but I ended up having a great time with other MVP's and Microsoft folks.

Well, that is basicly it for today.

I hope to upload some NAV 5.0 screenshots like tomorow or friday.

Best,

Mark

Marije_Brummel

PS. Please keep doing the smiley posts and the PM's I realy like it

kine

After your new experiences, are you happy that you are MVP? ;-)

I hope that I will have chance to be on TechEd Europe... [-o<

DenSter

Wait until you get to the MVP Summit Mark, that's a whole different level of people sharing information. Very cool updates, keep them coming

johnson_alonso

Mark wrote:

I hope to upload some NAV 5.0 screenshots like tomorow or friday.

,

It's nice to hear that you share your knowledge about Dyn. NAV version 5.0, but could you tell me the website that you provide in which I can see NAV 5.0 screenshots as you've said ? [-o<


Rgds,
Johnson

Luc_VanDyck

No update from Mark today. The Guiness must have knocked him down :-k

johnson_alonso

Luc wrote:

No update from Mark today. The Guiness must have knocked him down

do you mean guiness beer..? if yes, , the guiness is really good to drink let alone carlsberg...but don't drink overload, it will knock down...

Rgds,

Marije_Brummel

Update Thursday/Friday.

I am in an information overload.

we are out ov NAV sessions. so I basicly have a change to hang aroud a bit.

Yesterday there was a big party at Fenway park we attenden. [We is Stuart, Anders, Robert and me].

They only served Heineken there but you realy don't want to drink that. I had a Samual Adams at the pub.

This it for now at the teched. I'll be goiing back to haolland i a few hours.

PS. I am posting this from the same machine where the NAV 5 client is installed, I've been plaing with it for an hour and it is realy a great user interface

Savatage

PS. I am posting this from the same machine where the NAV 5 client is installed, I've been plaing with it for an hour and it is realy a great user interface

rub it in why don'cha!

I like the way you changed your location & flag this week

Marije_Brummel

DenSter

Can you like pop in a cd and burn an image of the hard drive