C/AL to AL, but better & faster

At the airport of Copenhagen (CPH) eating my favorite burger. (Aamanns Burger). Then writing a blog.

This is an awkward blog, a blog that was asked for by my colleague Jan when I spent a few days at our office. He asked if I could blog something about converting from C/AL to AL with the ForNAV converter based on the series of blogs by Freddy. (https://freddysblog.com/tag/c-al-to-al/).

Off course, at ForNAV, converting code is our bread and butter. But our converter from C/AL to AL is free of charge. Everyone can use it and when they find an issue enter a support ticket. Why should we promote that? It’s just more work…

But here we go!

Skipped Step 1 – Upgrade to the latest C/Side

This is an obsolete step when using the ForNAV converter to convert to AL. This saves you a lot of time because you can create an extension directly from any 2013 or newer database.

The reason Microsoft needs to you first merge in C/Side is that they did the preparation for the conversion in FinSQL.exe. The ForNAV converter does that natively in the process.

Skipped Step 2 – Change Codeunit 1 event subscribers

I blogged about this yesterday. Microsoft has removed codeunit 1 and you have to change all your event subscribers.

The ForNAV converter takes care of that for you. We convert all your subscribers. (This is off-course useless if you are on 2013…)

Skipped Step 3 – Usage Category

Menu Suites are dead, and that is not a bad thing. They are replaced by a new property called Usage Category.

The ForNAV converter populates the Usage Category for you based on the menu suite. A lot less manual work

100% Automated Conversion

It is possible to have 100% automated conversion and keep one codebase. Thousands of customers will keep running C/Side for years and as an ISV you want to serve them.

My recommendation to ISV’s is to achieve 100% automated conversion so you can keep downgrading and upgrading.

You can download the free ForNAV converter to AL here. https://www.fornav.com/download/

The benefit you get for free is that you get to use C/Side for many more years and you can probably get to Visual Studio Code once it is stable and equally productive as C/Side.

YouTube Video…

This video shows what you can do with the ForNAV conversion tool. It’s free to use and will save you a lot of time compared to the Microsoft tooling.