I've talked in the past about how Dynamics NAV 5 will be a
consistent revolution on all the aspects. One of the main things that I want
to take in consideration today is how the development effort will change
with this new release of the product.
The main questions that I receive from customers are: C/AL will be available
again? What about actual implementations of objects?
Dynamics NAV 5 will embrace (and I'm really happy to say
this) the .NET world: Dynamics NAV applications will be written again
with C/AL code, but this C/AL code will be translated into .NET
code and compiled into a managed assembly. Developers should not be worried
about this, the compilation process is transparent and the managed code will be
deployed into the Service Tier as a single DLL (no granular compilation as the
actual 4.0x version).
Dynamics NAV 5 will have a new Web Services toolbox
that enables making C/AL code accessible remotely from Microsoft Dynamics NAV,
the form designer will be improved (will be able to target multiple displays and
you will be able to add personalizations on it) and we'll have a new advanced
reporting solutions based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.
Reports will be in RDL format, so they can be created from Navision and modified
with external tools (such as Visual Studio .NET for example).
As you can imagine, the platform will be more robust and
scalable.