26. November 2018

My highlights and sessions from NAV TechDays 2018

First of all: NAV TechDays 2018 once again was an amazing conference, both organization and content were very impressive. Luc van Dyck and the team continue to keep up an extremely high level and even improve. Thanks a lot, I already look forward to next year, whether I again will have the honor to present or as an attendee!

My highlights from other sessions

There really were a lot of interesting news but the following are my five main highlights in no particular order:

Microsoft will componentize the whole base application into smaller extensions with the idea to either extend or replace them, according to the need of a customer or partner. That was announced on several occasions before, but the following two bits of information where new, at least for me:
- Those new extensions will be available as open source on Github and they also will be open for pull requests. That is an amazing prospect and will allow the whole ecosystem to drive the development of the standard application in a completely different way. One more step into the already visible direction to become an open, approachable and agile community.
- When talking about replacing extensions, Microsoft speakers somewhat vaguely referred to a „versioned contract“ to define what an extension does and especially what someone needs to provide in order to replace that extension. After one of the sessions someone from the audience asked a question that I also wanted to ask: How might that „versioned contract“ look like? One of the Microsoft speakers¹ answered that there is a discussion if and maybe when something similar to C# interfaces might be introduced to AL. While that again of course is very vague, I think it is very good news that this kind of change is at least on the table as previous attempts in that direction usually got no (see e.g. here) or immediate negative feedback. Again, absolutely no guarantees where given whatsoever but at least having a discussion about it is a good sign.
Imagine a scenario where we have a true extensibility mechanism like interfaces as part of AL and an open source repository for the base app. And then think back five years. What an impressive journey…
„Zoom“ from the Windows Client will get an improved cousin in the Web Client called „Page Inspector“. It will show the fields as zoom does but it will also show extensions and because it changes on the fly it will allow quickly scanning fields in a list as well.
The functional improvements that Business Central Cloud customers get as part of their monthly updates will also be part of the cumulative updates released for Business Central OnPrem. Once more, Microsoft stays true to their promise that the on premise solution will not be an afterthought but instead will be as much on par with the cloud solution as possible.
The session „Performance: Business Central reloaded for the Cloud“ by Torben Wind Meyhoff, Bardur Knudsen and Jens Moller-Pedersen was definitely one of the best technical sessions I have ever heard². Technical content by techies for techies³ as it should be. Go and watch the recording as soon as it appears if you didn’t have the chance to be there
Of course Waldo & Vjeko as Waldorf & Statler. I don’t want to spoil the fun, so if you haven’t been there, also just go and watch the recording as soon as it is available

My sessions

I had great fun with two pre-workshops on Docker on Windows / NAV on Docker and also with a session about Real life scenarios for running NAV / BC on Docker. Thanks to all who participated! The content will of course be spread through mibuso and also you can find it here.

In an upcoming blog post I will also explain how I implemented the live voting both in the second workshop day and in the session.

Once more, thanks a lot to Luc and his team for organizing TechDays and making it possible, and also to all speakers for their dedication and the great content they provided. I very much hope to see you all again next year!

I unfortunately can’t remember if it was Gert Robyns, Michael Hammond or Bardur Knudsen
and I have heard a lot of bad, quite some good and a few exceptional ones
quoting Torben Leth here