A bit of NAV 6.0 into the 5.0 SP1

Today the Dynamics NAV Team has officially announced something more details about the decision to move the delivery date of the next NAV release.

The big work that the Dynamics NAV Team is doing around the future 6.0 release is resumable as follow:

  • We have moved the product from a two-tier architecture to a three-tier architecture dramatically increasing the integration opportunities for customers.
  • We have added support for web services across the board and enabled all of our ISV and partner solutions to also be web serviced enabled. The win for customers is the ability to leverage the open interface from multiple applications in their organizations.
  • We have transitioned our runtime execution engine from an interpreted environment to a compiled environment running on.NET. Giving customers increased performance and stability and aligning us even closer with the advances being on the Microsoft Stack.
  • We have transitioned our reporting story to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and the incredible richness that it provides for users to gain more insight into their business.
  • We have added a deep integration with Office SharePoint Services making it even easier to get more people in an organization working with your business system.
  • Finally, and most dramatically and importantly, we’ve made a MAJOR upgrade to a new Role Tailored User Experience that our research indicates that customers will absolutely Love.

But the great news for all the NAV Partners is that Microsoft will add some 6.0 features into the next Service Pack for NAV 5.0. About this Service Pack, the NAV Team say us that:

  • We are going to deliver Dynamics Mobile support for Dynamics NAV as part of the service pack and for Dynamics NAV 4.0. This feature will allow our partners to create mobile solutions that are occasionally connected and fully integrated with Dynamics NAV.
  • We brought forward a number of Microsoft SQL data access improvements. These will increase both the performance and scalability of the product.
  • We have added a collection of small features that have been highly requested over the years.
  • We have rolled up a number of the improvements and corrections that have been done since version 5.0 shipped.
  • We will expand the number of countries that will have version 5.0 in their markets.

Wonderful to see all this work around the new NAV platform...

I have a request however: with this delay on the release date of NAV 6.0, why not try to improve also the IDE experience? I don't want to say to transform the C/AL IDE into something powerful as Visual Studio, but I think that all the NAV developers want something more on this field...

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Print | posted on Sunday, October 21, 2007 11:36 PM

Comments on this post

# re: A bit of NAV 6.0 into the 5.0 SP1

Requesting Gravatar...
Hi Stefano,

You say that they should improve the IDE and I totally agree with you.

However, suggesting that they increase the scope of the project because the deadline has been extended is one of the classic Project Management mistakes.

The release date has slipped because they couldn't get it working on time (ignoring all the MS Marketing spin). Increasing the scope of the project will endanger their chances of meeting the later deadline - something they must not do.

Having said that, If I had to ask for a new feature it would be the ability to step out of a function in the debugger and get back to where you came from - currently if you accidentally step into a function you can end up going through a lot of code before you get back to where you wanted to be.

Great Blog by the way! (I just said that in case you moderate your comments ;-)
Left by Gaspode The Wonderdog on Nov 01, 2007 2:10 AM

# re: A bit of NAV 6.0 into the 5.0 SP1

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I agree with you... this is another feature that can improve the development experience with NAV and can help a lot all developers.
Unfortunately, news that comes from Microsoft are not so good on this field, the IDE seems that will be always the same.
Thanks for your feedback... I know that some MS man read here, so maybe... :P
Left by Stefano Demiliani on Nov 01, 2007 1:27 PM

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