20 Dec Final thoughts after NAV Tech Days 2019

Another year that we didn’t want to miss NAV Tech Days, an unavoidable technical appointment for developers and solution architects of Dynamics 365 Business Central . After a month of the event, with time to settle ideas, we want to write this article to bring together the main topics discussed.

The community is growing and a good example of this, is that in this edition we met in Antwerp 1,411 developers from 47 different countries to attend the event and share experiences.

The final number of attendees of #navtechdays 2019 is *1411*, coming from 47 countries. Thank you all for participating! #newrecord 🍾🍾🍾 pic.twitter.com/XSRXseBsLp

— NAV TechDays (@NAVTechDays) November 25, 2019

As it is a classic for us, we attend the preconference days. The first one with @ waldo1001 , which is already a must for us of this event that always exceeds expectations. In ‘Developing Extensions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’, he introduced an introduction from 0 to development in AL for Business Central . An intense day to get into the new programming language and definitely say bye bye to the C/AL language .

Honored and proud to have been voted “Best Session” and “Best Speaker” of @NAVTechDays (unofficially and indirectly ;-)). Thanks for the feedback, the nice comments, and the positive criticism! Up to the next!https://t.co/JFXT0RU9tV pic.twitter.com/Sht0TH99V2

— waldo (@waldo1001) December 16, 2019

In Triangle, we have already made migrations and developments in new versions in AL language but the formation of our team in this language is constant.

Following this same theme, the second day we attended the pre conference ‘Data exchange with AL language in Microsoft 365 Business Central‘ to learn from key industry figures what are the best practices to exchange data information between different external applications and Business Central, using API programming in AL.

For example, we developed an API on-site to be consumed externally from Business Central, managing to consult a football website and incorporate match data directly into Business Central. This exercise is easily replicable to any real need of a company that needs to obtain data from other sources.

“Working with API makes it very easy to integrate between Business Central and other external applications, as they avoid typical problems of file processing.”

Already in the inaugural Keynote, @vnidk @nav_horinas @aidaonnav y @BugsyDK, they outlined some of the issues that had already been addressed in Directions EMEA 2019, such as the execution of background tasks so that the performance of Business Central Cloud facilities is not affected. In this sense, they also added that in the next CU we can have a “Ghosting” to improve the speed in some tasks such as, for example, opening the file of a client.

Along the same lines, they stressed that a replica of the database in read-only mode can now be available to gain speed.

Likewise, we leave you with an image of the areas of improvement for the future of the product:

Another recurring term in different sessions and illustrated in the previous image is that of ‘ Telemetry ’. We had already talked to you in previous publications about the possibilities offered by partners as having actual consumption statistics to monitor services and anticipate errors.

In the session ‘ How to run faster in SaaS ’ they showed us how to configure telemetry and Performance Regression Tests to detect performance problems.

Another of our interests to be covered in NAV Tech Days revolved around integrations. In a reality in which more and more, our clients present complex digital ecosystems in which different applications coexist, knowing first hand what possibilities exist to dominate the era of integrations was crucial for us. @Alex_Ermakov y @abaludin presentaron pequeñas demos de las principales herramientas del mercado que nos permiten llevar a cabo integraciones con Business Central.

Thanks a lot @luc_vandyck for the never-decreasing quality of #NAVTechDays. I know how challenging it is. I enjoyed every minute as usual, and it has been a great honor for me to wear this white shirt this year. Count on us next time! #MSDyn365BC pic.twitter.com/1wDPTq3lP0

— Alexander Ermakov (@Alex_Ermakov) November 22, 2019

We saw examples as different as the creation of chatbots, automations for the entry of new workers into the company, limitations and considerations for companies working in different regions, migrations from On-premise to cloud, moving from a Manual drawing to HTML code using Microsoft Sketch2Code, among others.

Given that the Windows client has disappeared in this release, we didn’t want to miss out on ‘ Developing for Modern clients ’. From this moment on, there will be different methods to customize the modern client. We can continue to modify this client as a developer partner but tools have also been presented for customers to gain autonomy in the definition and customization of roles.

In this session we take the opportunity to refresh some of the functional productivity news presented in Dynamics 365 Business Central 2019 Wave 2.

And finally, highlight the session ‘ NAV / BC for highly Demanding environment ’. We attend this session with especially those of our clients who work handling large volumes of data in mind.

Microsoft considers environments with high demand in the following scenarios:

Customers with large volumes of data or who, for example, have e-commerce and, therefore, must be available 24/7, need a highly scalable system. Both speakers and session attendees share experiences on how to scale without compromising the performance of these facilities and best practices on how to manage them.

As a summary we leave the aftermovie of mibuso.com (@luc_vandyck) para que podáis ver la magnitud del evento NAV Tech Days 2019 en Antwerp (Belgium)

We look forward to seeing what the future holds for Business Central at the technical level. At the moment, almost total integration has been achieved with the rest of the products in the Microsoft suite and opens up endless possibilities for integration with third-party applications.

In addition, it is clear that it will be easier to incorporate new developers into the community, since with tools such as Visual Studio the doors are open for those programmers trained in other languages.

And we want to finish this article by thanking the organization for the hard work to gather 4 days of high quality content and we leave you with one of our best leisure moments in Antwerp. See you next year!

Picture time!