NAVTechDays – It’s a peoples event…

It’s the weekend after NAVTechDays and I rested from a busy week. Two days of pre-conference training and two days of talking at (a lot of) people mostly at the ForNAV booth but also at the booth of Meta UI, Continia, SQL Perform, Anveo, Prism and AL Ops.

Design Patterns, once again

Teaching the Design Patterns for AL the first time was fun, challenging and exhausting. It was fun because I got to talk about my passion once again, clean code and design patterns. Challenging because it was the first time on AL and my attendees almost all were experienced with having apps on AppSource and PerTenant apps. It was exhausting because I had no idea what to prepare for and the group was very interactive.

Once again I felt I learned more than the students combined. I know that our community is ready for the next step in AL. We finished converting from C/Side and we’re ready to move on. Some of us at least.

One of my attendees, you may know him, Michael Megel encouraged me to think out of the box once again and take the patterns to the next level of abstraction.

I’ll blog about this more in the following weeks but you can take a sneak preview at https://github.com/al-design-patterns.

With C/Side the patterns were left behind with Microsoft on their old wiki. I talked at NAVTechDays with Bugsy to see if they can be carried foreward to AL and Visual Studio Code too. To be continued.

Although I don’t have the ambition I had a few years back I do hope to teach a bit more next period. I am traveling to Denmark next week to teach PrintVis and I applied to teach the class at Days of Knowledge in Denmark.

NAVTechDays

I felt the general atmosphere at NAVTechDays was very positive. The most positive I have seen in a long time.

At the ForNAV booth I have only done demo’s of our AppSource solution. Nobody is remotely interested in the old world which is great.

Where last year most attendees had no clue of the problem we’re trying to solve they now were super enthousiastic of our offering. I guess you first have to try RDLC with AL to appreciate the alternative. ;-).

This seems to be even more true for the new Meta UI product from Global Mediator. It’s now roughly 15 months ago that we locked up two insanely smart JavaScript/Angular experts in an office with no outside windows. I gave them an API endpoint and the question to use that MetaData to build an improved Grid control. The rest is history and the product, a result of more than 10 manyears, was presented at NAVTechDays last week.

I was so proud to see one of these JavaScript experts, the architect of the solution, giving demo’s of the product as if he lived his whole life in Business Central and to hear people say things like “where did this come from all of the sudden”, and “this is by far the best thing I’ve seen this year at NAVTechDays”.

It proves that to be successful with Business Central you need to step outside of your comfort zone and work with people who are smart in technology that can be combined with AL very easily.

Where Directions are to give a roadmap to a company, NAVTechDays is to give inspiration to developers.

The sponsors of NAVTechDays are all but one (I think) companies that offer tools. Different from Directions where there are more vertical solution ISV’s using the oportunity to talk at their international partners.

I hope that NAVTechDays and Directions can co-exist side by side for many years to come although it may be time to start calling it BCTechDays.