Each new version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV is the result of inspiration and hard work along with some good fortune and expert technical investment over the last thirty years.

In 2000, Navision Software A/S and its primary Danish competitor, Damgaard A/S, merged. Product development and new releases continued for the primary products of both original firms (Navision and Axapta). In 2002, the now much larger Navision Software, with all its products (Navision, Axapta, and the smaller, older C5, and XAL) was purchased by Microsoft, becoming part of the Microsoft Business Systems division along with the previously purchased Great Plains Software business and its several product lines. All the Navision and Great Plains products received a common rebranding as the Dynamics product line. Navision was renamed Dynamics NAV.

As early as 2003, research began with the Dynamics NAV development team planning moves to further enhance NAV and take advantage of various parts of the Microsoft product line. Goals were defined to increase integration with products such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook. Goals were also set to leverage the functional capabilities of Visual Studio and SQL Server, among others. All the while, there was a determination not to lose the strength and flexibility of the base product.

NAV 2009 was released in late 2008, NAV 2013 in late 2012, followed by NAV 2015 in late 2014. The biggest hurdles to the new technologies have been cleared. A new user interface, the Role Tailored Client, was created as part of this renewal. NAV was tightly integrated with Microsoft's SQL Server and other Microsoft products such as Office, Outlook, and SharePoint. Development is more integrated with Visual Studio and more .NET compliant. The product is becoming more open and, at the same time, more sophisticated supporting features such as Web Services access, Web and tablet clients, the integration of third-party controls, RDLC, and Word-based reporting, and so on.

Microsoft continues to invest in, enhance, and advance NAV. More new capabilities and features are yet to come, continuing to build on the successes of the past. We will all benefit.

One of the first questions asked by people new to C/AL is often "what other programming language is it like?" The best response is "Pascal". If the questioner is not familiar with Pascal, the next best response would be "C" or "C#".

At the time the three founders of Navision were attending classes at Denmark Technical University (DTU), Pascal was in wide use as a preferred language not only in computer courses, but also in other courses where computers were tools and software had to be written for data analyses. Some of the strengths of Pascal as a tool in an educational environment also served to make it a good model for Navision's business applications development.

Perhaps coincidentally (perhaps not) at DTU in this same time period, a Pascal compiler called Blue Label Pascal was developed by Anders Hejlsberg. That compiler became the basis for what was Borland's Turbo Pascal, which was the "everyman's compiler" of the 1980s because of its low price. Anders went with his Pascal compiler to Borland. While he was there, Turbo Pascal morphed into the Delphi language and the IDE tool set under his guidance.

Anders later left Borland and joined Microsoft, where he led the C# design team. Much of the NAV-related development at Microsoft is now being done in C#. So the Pascal-C/AL-DTU connection has come full circle, only now it appears to be C#-C/AL. Keeping it in the family, Anders' brother, Thomas Hejlsberg also works at Microsoft on NAV as a Software Architect. Each in their own way, Anders and Thomas continue to make significant contributions to Dynamics NAV.

In a discussion about C/AL and C/SIDE, Michael Nielsen of Navision and Microsoft, who developed the original C/AL compiler, runtime, and IDE, said that the design criteria were to provide an environment that could be used without the following:

Paraphrasing some of Michael's additional comments, the goals of the language and IDE design were to do the following:

Michael is still working as part of the Microsoft team in Denmark on new capabilities for NAV. This is another example of how, once part of the NAV community, most of us want to stay part of this community.

To get the maximum out of this book as a developer, you should have the following attributes:

If you have these attributes, this book will help you become productive with C/AL and NAV much more rapidly.

Even though this book is targeted first at developers, it is also designed to be useful to executives, consultants, managers, business owners, and others who want to learn about the development technology and operational capabilities of Dynamics NAV. If you fit into one of these or similar categories, start by studying Chapter 1, An Introduction to NAV 2015, for a good overview of NAV and its tools. Then you should review sections of other chapters as the topics apply to your specific areas of interest.

This book's illustrations are from the W1 Cronus database Dynamics NAV V2015.

Chapter 1, An Introduction to NAV 2015, starts with an overview of NAV as a business application system. This is followed by an introduction to the seven types of NAV objects, and the basics of C/AL and C/SIDE. Then we will do some hands-on work and define Tables, multiple Page types, and a Report. We'll close with a brief discussion of how backups and documentation are handled in C/SIDE.

Chapter 2, Tables, focuses on the foundation level of NAV data structure: Tables and their structures. We will cover Properties, Triggers (where C/AL resides), Field Groups, Table Relations, and SumIndexFields. We'll work our way through the hands-on creation of several tables in support of our example application. We will also review the types of tables found in the NAV applications.

Chapter 3, Data Types and Fields, we will learn about fields, the basic building blocks of the NAV data structure. We review the different Data Types in NAV. We will cover all the field properties and triggers in detail. We'll also review the three different Field Classes. We'll conclude with a discussion about the concept of filtering and how it should be considered in the database structure design.

Chapter 4, Pages – The Interactive Interface, we will review the different types of pages, their structures (Triggers, Properties) and general usage. We'll build several pages for our example application using Page Wizard and Page Designer. We will also study the different types of controls that can be used in the pages. In addition, we'll review how and where actions are added to the pages.

Chapter 5, Queries and Reports, we will learn about both Queries and Reports, two methods of extracting data for presentation to users. For Queries, we will study how they are constructed and some of the ways they are utilized. For Reports, we will walk through report data flow and the variety of different report types. We will study the two Report Designers, the C/SIDE Report Designer and the Visual Studio Report Designer and how a NAV report is constructed using both of these. We'll learn what aspects of reports use one designer and what aspects use the other. As in the previous studied objects, we will discuss Properties and Triggers. We will review how reports can be made interactive and will do some hands-on report creation.

Chapter 6, Introduction to C/SIDE and C/AL, we will learn about general Object Designer Navigation as well as the individual Designers (Table, Page, Report). We'll study C/AL code construction, syntax, variable types, expressions, operators, and functions. We will then take a closer look at some of the more frequently used built-in functions. The chapter will wrap up with an exercise on adding some C/AL code to a report objects created in an earlier exercise.

Chapter 7, Intermediate C/AL, we will dig deeper into C/AL development tools and techniques. We will review some more advanced built-in functions including those relating to dates and decimal calculations, both critical business application tools. We'll study the C/AL functions that support process flow control functions, input/output, and filtering. Then we'll do a review of methods of communication between objects. Finally, we'll apply some of what we've learned to enhance our example application.

Chapter 8, Advanced NAV Development Tools, we will review some of the more important elements of the Role Tailored User Experience, in particular the Role Center Page construction. We will dig into the components of a Role Center Page and how to build one. We'll also cover XMLports and Web Services, two of the powerful ways of connecting NAV applications to the world outside of NAV. To better understand these, we will not only review their individual component parts, but also go through the hands-on effort of building an example of each one.

Chapter 9, Successful Conclusions, we will study in detail how NAV functions are constructed and learn how to construct your own functions. We will learn more about tools and features built into C/AL and C/SIDE. We will study the new debugger, review the support for Test-Driven Development, and take a look at the ability to integrate .NET Client Add-ins. We will integrate a .NET Add-in into our example applications. Finally, we will review tips to design efficiently, update and upgrade the system with the goal of helping us to become more productive and high quality NAV developers.

Appendix, Review Answers, provides you with the answers to the questions given in each chapter.

You will need some basic tools including at least the following:

Access to other NAV manuals, training materials, websites, and experienced associates will obviously be of benefit, but they are not required for the time with this book to be a good investment.

This book is for:

The reader of this book:

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

CalculateNewDate;
"Date Result" := CALCDATE("Date Formula to Test","Reference Date for Calculation");

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Description column, we will put notes for the fields that need properties set later."

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