Create and use Web Services in a Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV

Create and use Web Services in a Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV solution (Belgian MSDN Evening)

Source: my blog

Recently (last Thursday) I joined the MSDN Evening, organised by Microsoft, to learn more about how to use webservices in a NAV implementation. Now, I have to say, I was not able to follow the session, unfortunately .

Namely, I had the honors to work together with a Microsoft employee on a presentation about webservices in NAV2009. We did some work before this session, but also during this session to create the session, to create a cool demo . Off course, this made me miss the original one. Nevertheless, this time, they recorded the session. So from now on, everybody over the world can enjoy the Belgian MSDN sessions. I know it was a comment on one of my first blogs about the the MSDN evenings ... well ... they did something about it . Long live the community .

You can find the video here: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=323. I hope everybody can log in and watch the video - it was very interesting imho.

So, what did we (the microsoft employee (Kurt Juvyns) and I) do during the session? Well, Kurt intended to give a little preview on how we will be able to create webservices in the future - in NAV 2009. In some conferences I attended, I had the opportunity to see some demo's about this, so I somewhat had an idea on how it should work. That's why Kurt asked for my help.

We wanted to show how easy it was to do your own thing, and that's why we created our own codeunit to be published as a webservice. I won't go into it too deeply (with codesamples or whatever - I will do that whenever this comes available), but this is what we did in only one and a half hour of development in C#, C/SIDE and Infopath:

Create a "Hello World" in C# - the webservice was based on a custom codeunit;
Create a customer card in Infopath - the webservice was based on a page (Customer card);
Create a webservice to create a customer in C# - the webservice was based on a page (Customer Card) - it executed the business logic to generate a new number, and to fill the Search description.
Create a webservice that posted an invoice - based on our custom codeunit: to show that a very big piece of business logic can be used out-of-the-box;
Create a customer list by publishing a page (Customer List) in C#. Looping a recordset with a foreach, and just adding the recordset into a grid.
It was remarkable to see how fast we could create these kinds of things (knowing that Kurt and I never worked with Infopath or C# ). One thing was for sure - the people who attended the evening were quite impressed about this upcoming technology - as am I .

There are some pictures on my blogas well .