What do you want to know about Dynamics NAV from Convergence

David_Singleton

Anyone that is not going to convergence, but wants some information about Navision, (espeically 5.00/5.10 stuff). I will be taking questions on my Blog to ask Microsoft on your behalf if you want and getting answers which I will post back there.


http://dynamicsusers.org/blogs/singleton/default.aspx

Miklos_Hollender

Oh, all I would like to hear is to have a chief architect go down on knees and cry aloud three times:

"Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa... I swear that from now on we'll have three times as much testing as we had with SP2...

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa... I swear that from now on we'll have three times as much testing as we had with SP2...

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa... I swear that from now on we'll have three times as much testing as we had with SP2..."

ara3n

LoL now that 5.0 is postponed for a year, I guess they will have the time.
What I've seen about asking for question in these gatherings is that they don't release any new info. So it's pointless to ask them.

Nevertheless, Why is there a 250 character limit between COM and Navision?
Will they fix or create a way to actually trap the error string of Navision?
With webservices and what not, You can't just send a default error. "Error at posting".



The more features they add to standard navision, the more they have to take care when clients upgrade to one Dynamics product. Will we see new big features, or just improvements of existing ones. I personally would like to have a solid WMS, Inventory, Item tracking, Reservation, than some half backed employee portal.

Alex_Chow

More importantly, can Navision still be used only with a keyboard?

This was one of the key productivity advantage Navision has.

mark_christs

stressful reply like Miklos is what I throw away. it seems that you are not really serious but playing with David's message.
But I think it is important to discuss although seems to early.
What I want to know that all technical problems will be solved that previously still prevent us freely in using navision.


Rgds,

David_Singleton

deadlizard wrote:

More importantly, can Navision still be used only with a keyboard?

This was one of the key productivity advantage Navision has.

This question is alrady top of my list. When I mentioned it to the developers once, it was more of a "Oh they do that do they".

I really can't see how a company can work efficiently using a mouse. What ends out happening is that a whole lot of unnecessary coding goes on to make it eaier touse the system, instead of training the users to use the keyboard.

A complete rethought needs to go into the whole menu suite concept in an ERP environment. Another thing is this business of "Full Screen" The whole concept of Navision's design was that you could open multiple linked forms, and work the way you need to. Now we see hundreds of controls cramped onto a fullscreen form, when it could easily be done by training the user to open more forms at once.

These two issues are big for me.

David_Singleton

mark_christs wrote:

stressful reply like Miklos is what I throw away. it seems that you are not really serious but playing with David's message.
But I think it is important to discuss although seems to early.
What I want to know that all technical problems will be solved that previously still prevent us freely in using navision.


Rgds,

Thanks Mark, and yes I just tend to ignore those that don't take things seriously. Please let me know what you want to find out, and I will ask.

Alex_Chow

David Singleton wrote:

I really can't see how a company can work efficiently using a mouse. What ends out happening is that a whole lot of unnecessary coding goes on to make it eaier touse the system, instead of training the users to use the keyboard.

A complete rethought needs to go into the whole menu suite concept in an ERP environment. Another thing is this business of "Full Screen" The whole concept of Navision's design was that you could open multiple linked forms, and work the way you need to. Now we see hundreds of controls cramped onto a fullscreen form, when it could easily be done by training the user to open more forms at once.

These two issues are big for me.

Yes, please stress on that. We have customers complaining about this whole menusuite business. Basically, having something that you use seldomly taking up 1/3 of their screen really doesn't make sense.

And no, having the ability to hide it is not the answer.

ara3n

Maybe if it auto hides?

kine

One year ago the MVPs got mail with questions from developers team about usage of many things in Navision (entering date, time, using keyboard etc.). All MVPs answered that main thing is that the product must be usable without mouse. I hope, that they take it seriously. Other stress was on possibility to enter dates in "short" format like "0112" or just "02" etc...

Alex_Chow

When I brought the question up during Directions, the Microsoft rep assured that they were making the product more keyboard friendly. However, he didn't sound assuing enough to me that this was their top priority.

Alex_Chow

One other message, David, if you would bring to Microsoft is what I mentioned in another thread.

If they can bundle all the things we need to install Dyanmics NAV in one product offering. This is so we can effectively sell to the customers instead of presenting multiple software quotes.

More noteable is SQL Server and Sharepoint server.

One step further is if they can create a wizard that will make installation simple. Simple enough that you can walkthrough a client over the phone at 11:00pm, after their server crashed, in 15 minutes on how to setup a brand new Navision server without losing patience or beauty sleep.

Also, a product that does not require a small to medium size company to house an internal IT staff to maintain. This was a key selling point in Navision as well.

kriki

And also some other things for us developers:
-Text should at least be able to contain 32K of chars or even better 54K. Bigtexts are not the answer because to complicated to use (try a MESSAGE with a bigtext or try to see the value in the debugger...)
-Undo in the Navision-editor should be stronger. Not just undo of the current line.

ara3n

I think we will be stuck with text editor, until Nav is moved to new dev environment, VS? It's a hopeless case to ask for anything in that area.

Alex_Chow

ara3n wrote:

I think we will be stuck with text editor, until Nav is moved to new dev environment, VS? It's a hopeless case to ask for anything in that area.

I hope that the Navision development will never move to VS.

kine

May be that Visio is good developer tool for nextgen applications... :-) look for example for using Visio for Biztalk2006...

ara3n

deadlizard wrote:

ara3n wrote:

I think we will be stuck with text editor, until Nav is moved to new dev environment, VS? It's a hopeless case to ask for anything in that area.

I hope that the Navision development will never move to VS.

Why? I love Visual Studio environment.

Dennis_Decoene

ara3n wrote:

deadlizard wrote:

ara3n wrote:

I think we will be stuck with text editor, until Nav is moved to new dev environment, VS? It's a hopeless case to ask for anything in that area.

I hope that the Navision development will never move to VS.

Why? I love Visual Studio environment.

So do I.

Miklos_Hollender

Well I've tried out VS2005 C# Express and wasn't at all impressed. Slow, bloated, and you need a 20'' screen if you want to have sufficient coding area with all the important windows open, or else always open and close windows. But my two most important problems were that I firmly believe that efficient development can only happen if you are in a Zen-like "zone" or "flow" state. And I think messing around with the mouse or the popping up of IntelliSense windows breaks the flow, only writing code and using keyboard shortcusts keeps me in the flow - and I could not figure out how to set f.e. form properties in VS just by the keyboard. And if we take intellisense out, what would remain for Navision? The online debugger? Not bad, but not a big thing.

Dennis_Decoene

Actually, once you get to know VS, you can do a lot with the KB. I don't know any task that is impossible with the kb.
The intellisense is the best thing to code fast, just start typing and press tab when it is on what you want.
No more F5, scroll,right,right,scroll,enter for selecting a field.
What about setranges? You need at least one F5 plus an edit or two F5's...
No, VS will help you code faster in any situation, you just have to know the inns and outs of the shortcut forest.

Alex_Chow

ara3n wrote:

Why? I love Visual Studio environment.

Because Visual Studio is designed for programmers and techies. I'm not a techie, but I can develop real solutions for real business saving real money in a short amount of time using C/AL.

I can guarentee you that projects will take more time to implement and be more error proned as soon as Navision switches to VS.

ara3n

There will be a learning curve, yes, but it shouldn't be blamed on VS.
I'm sure MS is thinking about this problem. You have to also think about 4 other ERP system that will be part of Dynamics. There is no other way but to make the dev environment VS.

The program language will and everybody will have to go through the learning curve. We have a couple of years till we get there.

Alex_Chow

Yes, I'm just whining...

There will be a learning curve, and I'm sure once I'm familiar with VS, I'll start wondering why anyone can develope anything using C/AL.

ara3n

ara3n wrote:

Why is there a 250 character limit between COM and Navision?

Looks like in 5.0 they have increased it to 1024 character.