Microsoft Dynamics NAV & 365 Business Central Developer Digest Vol. 409

Microsoft Dynamics NAV & 365 Business Central Developer Digest Vol. 409

ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. In Developer Digest Volume 409, you’ll read about the developer community’s thoughts on leaving Twitter and embracing Mastodon, the best tool for software documentation, and the topic of data isolation for extensions via Isolated Storage.  

The Dynamics NAV and Business Central community, including the ArcherPoint technical staff, is made up of developers, project managers, and consultants who are constantly communicating, with the common goal of sharing helpful information with one another to help customers be more successful.

As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them on blogs, forums, social media…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 community—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share the wealth of information with everyone who might not have the time to check out the multitude of resources out there?

Thus, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV/BC Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from Dynamics NAV and Business Central experts and devotees around the world. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.

Is the Developer Community Staying or Leaving Twitter?

The Dynamics NAV community is discussing options to leave Twitter if the social media platform doesn’t get its act together, soon. With the recent new ownership, Twitter has changed its blue verification checkmark policy many times in a matter of weeks, and the verification designation may require a paid subscription. Some heavy users are worried, and Daniel Rimmelzwaan recently talked about moving to Mastodon for discussion on Business Central and Dynamics NAV developments.

Comments below:

Rimmelzwaan: I just joined the new Mastodon channel that Luc created for us. I don’t have any plans to leave Twitter just yet (my personal feed is actually pretty clean and how I want it) but it’s good to be part of the alternative if Twitter goes to $#!+.

Luc Van Dyck created a Business Central Mastodon chat group, which includes Dynamics NAV and can be found here, msdyn365bc.social – msdyn365bc. The Mastodon chat group is an English-speaking Mastodon instance that is open to anyone who is interested in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Microsoft Dynamics NAV).

Brad: I’ll jump into the pool and reserve my spot if the time to move comes.

The overall consensus is a wait and see approach as Twitter finalizes its Blue subscription service. According to Twitter, the Blue subscription service will be relaunched on Nov. 29, 2022.

What’s the Best Tool for Software Documentation?

Let’s stay on Twitter, where we find an interesting thread on what is the best tool for software documentation in a MS Docs-style format. Waldo, a blogger and Business Central MVP, received these suggestions when he posed the question on Twitter:

Torben Leth: The little information I can give away now (publicly): .md files maintained through DevOps, which is then converted to HTML. Think we spoke to Eva at Microsoft about how they did it.

Chris King: Markdown documentation, hosted on GitHub using Jekyll? This is how we do it: docs.365businessdev.com

Steve Endow: Can this be converted to PDF as well?

Chris King: You can convert md files into PDF, yes. There are some VS Code extensions that exist for this purpose. But to be honest you have to supply additional CSS stylesheets to properly format the PDF file. I played with this a bit, but then decided to not ship docs as PDF.

Be sure to check out the software documentation thread, since it includes many different opinions.

Isolated Storage – Providing Data Isolation for Extensions

Roberto Stefanetti, dives into isolated storage and how you can use this data storage method to isolate data between different extensions, even within the same extension.

Stefanetti presents the Data Scope & Use Case:

DataScope: The “DataScope” of isolated storage key pairs can be limited to:

  • extension
  • a specific company
  • a specific user or a combination of company and user

Use Case: In practice, it is possible to pass data between different extensions without saving data in the table or on configuration files; it can be used for example to assign global variables (AS IS for the WORKDATE) to be passed \ used within the same extension in the user \ company session.

The entire process is depicted via the blog post: Isolated Storage, a Way to Store Global Data in a Session

Interested in Dynamics NAV and/or Business Central development? Be sure to see our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.

Read “How To” blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

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