Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Development Quick Start Guide

By : Alexander Drogin
Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Development Quick Start Guide

By: Alexander Drogin

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite for organizations. The system offers specialized functionality for manufacturing, distribution, government, retail, and other industries. This book gets you started with its integrated development environment for solving problems by customizing business processes. This book introduces the NAV development environment – C/SIDE. It gives an overview of the internal system language and the most essential development tools. The book will enable the reader to customize and extend NAV functionality with C/AL code, design a user interface through pages, create role centers, and build advanced reports in Microsoft Visual Studio. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to extend the NAV data model, how to write and debug custom code, and how to exchange data with external applications.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Getting Started with the NAV Development Environment

If you are reading this book, you probably know what Microsoft Dynamics NAV is and want to delve deeper into its customization possibilities. This quick start guide will help you understand different aspects of the NAV development environment, customization of application code, the user interface, and data exchange processes, debugging your code, and designing reports.

The examples in this book are based on Dynamics NAV 2018, but the Client/server Application Language (C/AL) syntax remains mostly the same since older versions. Recent NAV releases introduced specific language structures designed for interaction with .NET classes and interfaces, as well as task scheduling and handling new UI elements. But these topics are beyond language fundamentals, and hence are not covered in this quick start guide. Code samples accompanying the book can be compiled and run in any version of NAV starting from 2013.

The opening chapter of the book gives an overview of the setup and configuration process, and leads into the integrated development environment. It will cover the following topics:

  • Installing the NAV development environment
  • Managing NAV server configuration with the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
  • Managing NAV installation with the NAV Administration Shell
  • Introducing the Object Designer
  • Exporting and deploying NAV objects