It’s more than a week already .. so shame on me for not reporting back to you earlier. And the reason is obvious: work work work. But hey, finally an evening I can spend on writing on some blogs that I have been meaning to write for quite a while now.
But first things first: NAVTechDays 2012 was once again one of the greatest conventions I ever did. Like last year: the professionalism was top-notch! Luc did it once again .. and to be honest .. it wasn’t such a surprise ;°).
This year again, I was there as a speaker, an attendee and an exhibitor. A lot of roles, a lot of todo’s .. so as you can imagine, busy days .. . Sometimes I really ask myself .. why not just attending as an attendee, enjoy the atmosphere, no stress about sessions, meetings or whatever? But then again, afterwards, there is something called “satisfaction” that makes up for all the stress ;-).
Exhibitor
This year again, we were presenting the new version of iFacto ReVision, our Source Control tool (although, it’s starting to behave like a strong development tool). It’s been on the market for quite a while now, and we really have customers all over the globe .. . This year, however, me personally didn’t put all the work into our booth – on purpose. Mostly, because our (iFacto’s) Innovation Lead (Bart Bourgeois) was there .. and he’s really the best man for the job, as he knows iFacto ReVision as no other (as being the lead developer).
The new additions we had, like the integration with mergetool, really kicked in. Exciting people and lots of prospects. Also people were asking: with all the changes with NAV2013, will ReVision ever support it? But of course! It already does, and it didn’t even cost us any work! It was only about adding the Query object, and off we go! :-).
Speaker
Imagine to be in one of the biggest movie theatres that you have ever been in .. and standing below just in front of the biggest movie screen you have ever seen .. (on which your PowerPoint is presented, by the way), and you facing a crowd of about 350 people. Well, that’s exactly how it was :-). We were presenting our demo’s in FullHD resolution for a huge crowd 🙂 and (I hope) people could actually still read the code!
The topic of our session was “Best practices in development and design patterns”. And the idea was to present the ideas, concepts, experiences, .. that we are trying to put into a context, which we call “Partner Ready Software“.
It’s
a
topic
that
I
have
been
dealing
with
a
lot
lately, both
internally
at
iFacto
and
externally
in
the
community. A
good
design
in
your
software
is
one
of
the
most
important
things
for
ISV’s, partners, developers .. and
I’m
very
grateful
to
Luc
that
we (Gary, Mark and me)
got
the
chance
to
present
what
we
think with
Partner Ready Software.
After the session, we received lots of great feedback. Make sure you’re going to hear more of use in the future ;-). In the meanwhile, you can download our slidedeck here (the recording is going to be online as well .. but it wasn’t at the time I wrote this. Check here). Here’s PRS in action:
Attendee
I really enjoyed the few session I could attend. Why just a few? Well you know .. preparing our session .. our booth .. . The one that I really really enjoyed was Vjeko’s session: “Web Services black belt”. That guy is a genius! He knows .Net from inside out .. and is able to apply all these skills to C/AL with .Net Interop and such. He made me look like a rookie .. and I loved it ;-). Remember this post? Well .. Forget the dll. Vjeko showed a generic way to call webservices (NAV 2009 Page-webservices in his case), without the need of creating a proxy-class for it. He just compiles the proxyclass in memory, and is able to execute the methods in a weakly-typed way (hope that makes sense). If you don’t believe it, well, just download his solution.
And that was just the beginning. He even showed how you can make NAV webservices “stateful” .. and how you can combine “test codeunits” with all this to have NAV’s UI Messages (like CONFIRMs and such) from web services.
Complex as hell for a simple soul as me .. but for me, it wasn’t about the solution, but it’s so nice to see how far you can go if you just have enough creativity and combine the right things.. . His video is online and can be found here.
In fact, I strongly recommend you to watch, download, .. all sessions from NAVTechDays 2012, which you can find here. Enjoy!
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