Ok, it is official. I regret not attending at least one of the Directions events. They published their agenda and there is a really nice easter egg that you must search for.

When blogging about features that have not been released yet it’s always balancing on the edge of NDA and in this case I will “pretend” not to know any details. In general looking at the agenda for Directions and NAVTechDays is always giving you a good idea what is being released, especially when looking at the description.

Modern Development Experience

Maybe it is smart if I just copy and past the description without adding any words just not to get into trouble with Microsoft. In one of my recent “discussions” with Marko Perisic I was called “impatient”. Well, it is very hard not to be Marko, with all this exciting stuff you are working on. I want it yesterday!

Get back to the point dude!

Where was I, a yes, the Modern Development Experience. It was one of the coolest pieces of work I have seen and I hope they show and discuss that at Directions and more.

This is the session extract:

In this session we’ll demo our ‘work in progress’ design tools for building Extensions for Dynamics 365 for Financials. We’ll show how we’ve integrated with Visual Studio code for code editing, debugging & the move to objects as files instead of the database. We’ll also show the improvements we’ve made for C/AL and go over the event subscriber model for building extensions.

The session is done by Stuart Glasson and Esben Nyhuus Kristoffersen. I don’t know Esben but Stuart and I go back to when I first became an MVP when we were collegues for a week in Boston at TechEd. He is easy to regognise when he has is travel luggage with him since it has the Navision logo from the 1990ies. He has the right amount of Navision experience for this huge task which according to him is more a two year project than a two week sprint.

There is also an interactive discussion with Michael Hammond:

Ask the experts! Come for an interactive session and ask any questions you like about building extensions, new tools & compiler, events and AppSource.

GO TO THESE SESSIONS

Please! This is what we have been asking for at least a small decade. Discuss things like source control, smart compiler, regognising design patterns, using tempates!

Michael is an awesomely nice and smart guy. Unlike Stuart he has a GP background (AFAIK) which gives us a unique opportunity to mix both worlds, especially from an extensions perspective. Extensions are new to NAV but have been in GP forever (AFAIK).

Let’s do extensions open source! Let’s allow a quick change to a delta file in a production database running on SQL Azure. I have the balls, but I need the software to show them.

“Cloud Ready Software” Track

This year there is no MVP track but that does not mean my former Partner Ready Software friends are sitting in the audience.

Cloud Ready Software is a commercial software development company which spun-off from PRS two years ago when Gary, Waldo and Vjeko wanted to commercialise on the relationship with Microsoft and they did an amazing job. I am impressed. They created a list of sessions and workshops together with Microsoft that are designed to get you inspired to move to the cloud and work with extensions and repeatable software.

If you have to make a list of sessions I would make absolutely sure to put a lot of their stuff on your list.

The team is expanded with Arend Jan Kauffmann and Steven Renders. Go guys!

“Don’t get confused between my personality & my attitude. My personality is who I am, my attitude depends on who you are.”