ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 13
The ArcherPoint technical staff—made up of developers, project managers, and consultants – is constantly communicating internally, with the goal of sharing helpful information with one another.
As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them companywide on Yammer for everyone’s benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this group—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share them with the rest of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Community? So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from the ArcherPoint staff. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.
Kyle Hardin on Windows 7 shortcuts:
Windows-M – minimize all applications
Windows-Home – minimize everything but the current app
Windows-Shift-RightArrow – moves current app from main monitor to the right monitor
Requires multiple monitors (Windows-Shift-Left does the opposite)
Windows-L – lock the computer
Windows (by itself) – then start typing
This is how I find all apps that aren’t up on the task bar. I haven’t missed the Start Menu one tiny bit.
Example: Windows W O R D (then hit enter) runs Microsoft Word
Review the complete list at Lifehacker’s Master List of New Windows 7 Shortcuts
Dan Sass shared a link from Harvard Business Review on quantifying the customer experience:
“Of course, the rationale we often hear for not investing to deliver a great experience is that the cost is high. Speaking to executives inside these businesses, however, we often hear the opposite. That is: delivering great experiences actually reduces the cost to serve customers from what it was previously. Unhappy customers are expensive — being, for example, more likely to return products or more likely to require support. Systematically solve the source of dissatisfaction, you don’t just make them more likely to return — you reduce the amount they cost you to serve.”
Read the entire article: The Value of the Customer Experience, Quantified
Faithie Robertson has a solution for the NAV 2013 R2 bug regarding rendering the wrong caption on report fields:
[see the description of the bug in the ArcherPoint Weekly Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest – vol 11]
We finally got our fix from Microsoft on this one today.
To resolve the issue we have to:
- CUT the fields that are messed up from the page.
- Close and compile the page.
- Reopen the page and paste the fields back in.
- Compile the page.
There’s some sort of strange magic to the cut/paste part of the solution. You can remove the fields and re-add them from the field list of the table all day long and all you’ll get is frustrated. But if you cut and paste – you’re golden! I don’t know if they’ll pursue a hotfix on this or not, but if you see the issue – this seems to be the only way to fix it, as goofy as it is.
Kyle Hardin added to the discussion on using the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Application Profiler:
[see Dan’s original post on the NAVAppProfiler in the ArcherPoint Weekly Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest – vol 10]
Dan [Sass] posted a couple of weeks ago about the NAVAppProfiler for Dynamics NAV 2013 that does what Code Coverage used to do. Today, I tried it in battle.
The MSDN article that Dan posted, Introducing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Application Profiler, is good, and there are links to downloading the Add-On and a video (about 7 minutes long) on how to set it up and start using it.
However, the video leaves out an important step.
The Add-On that the NST runs is a DLL that hooks into the performance counters of Windows. When I tried to run it from RTC, I got this error:
Error Starting ETW: Access Denied (Administrator rights required to start ETW)
The trick is to add the service account that the NST is using to the local administrators group on the service tier server, and then restart the NST.
Important safety tip: This will not work with NAV 2013. The config XML file for the NST adds a new key called EnableFullALFunctionTracing in 2013 R2, and that isn’t present in 2013. I even tried adding it by hand, but it still doesn’t work.