Today I was reading Justas Janauskas's Blogs (a young guy that knows a lot of Navision development) and I was attracted to his last post about a "problem" that is present on the Navision integrated development environment.
Justas's instructions to reproduce the problem are these:
1. Open two Navision Clients for the same database. Lets call them Client A and Client B.
2. On Client A run and close Table 79 "Company Information". This action stores Table 79 to Object Cache.
3. On Client A in Object Designer select tables 70..85. Press F11 to be ready to compile them.
4. On Client B, open Table 79 "Company Information" and make some changes. Save the object and close it.
5. On Client A press Yes in compile dialog. All objects will be compiled and ALL CHANGES in T79 will be DISCARDED. Object Name, Versions, Date and Time will be restored from Object Cache of Client A.
Changing "Object Cache (KB)" property to "0" does not help. In previous versions of Navision there was no such problem.
I remember that such a problem was present not only on the last 4.02 version, but also on some previous versions.
But what really attracts my interest is the answer that Microsoft has given to this guy after the segnalation:
The Navision C/SIDE never have supported Multi-environment development. Such feature will not be implemented at the present time and is not in the scope for future releases. The Object cache is designed to lower network traffic when running the objects and not when designing the objects.
Really Microsoft has no plan to improve the Navision IDE on the future? This was a request that's on the air from the first versions of Navision and I remember that in the past I've launched it also from this blog.
With the upcoming release 5.0 of Dynamics NAV, we'll have a totally new ERP with lots of new features and a revolutionary architecture (3-tier and .NET-based)... but we'll have again this poor and old IDE to write our code? Any chance to have something revisited is only a dream?
P.S. I've listened that someone thinks that the future 5.0 version will permit us to develop Navision objects directly from Visual Studio: this is not true, the IDE will be the same as today and we'll write C/AL code directly from inside Dynamics NAV. Visual Studio will be a plus to write applications that works with the ERP. It will be possible to edit Navision reports inside Visual Studio, thanks to the new Reporting Services support and the new RDL format.