Preface

I started my professional career in the IT world many years ago as a pure developer, and I’ve spent many years of my life developing custom applications from scratch with Microsoft technologies.

When more than 12 years ago I also started working in the ERP field (and, in particular, with Microsoft Dynamics NAV), I learned that when implementing an ERP solution, there are some business tasks that you can efficiently solve using the internal ERP programming language (C/AL for Microsoft Dynamics NAV), but there are also many tasks that require the usage of other technologies to be solved in a brilliant way.

During these years, I had the chance to be involved (directly or indirectly) in many different ERP projects in different functional areas, and I’ve always seen what I call a “bad habit”: the standard ERP developer (or Microsoft Dynamics NAV developer in this case) tries to solve all development tasks using what he knows best: the C/AL programming language! He forgets that outside the ERP box, there’s a world of technologies that permit you to have a final solution that rocks, and many times, I see solutions (especially when integrating Microsoft Dynamics NAV with other applications) that are solved using old technologies or in a bad way.

A typical example is integrating Microsoft Dynamics NAV with an external application: I see very often that the NAV developer proposes to create integrations via file exchange (CSV) too if the external application supports APIs based on web services, and only because he only knows C/AL.

The main goal of this book is to open the mind of the ERP developer and help him understand how to solve integration tasks in a modern (and efficient) way.

This is my mantra: not all tasks must be solved using C/AL. Leave C/AL for the internal ERP business logic!

In this book, we’ll cover many business scenarios that you can find when implementing an ERP solution (all of them come from the real world), and we’ll see how to solve them in a modern way using “service-oriented” solutions and cloud services.