Times they are a changing - Extensions

Bob Dylan sang “Times they are a changing” and his words could not be more true for the Microsoft ERP sector this year.  We are all anticipating news on Dynamics 365 at the NAV User Group Summit in Tampa tomorrow.  Later this month NAV 2017 will be released and project Madeira is in full swing.

Microsoft is making a huge push to the Cloud and the key is going to be around a development concept called extensions.  We already have examples of those built for project Madeira in Microsoft’s AppSource.

Extensions were introduced in the NAV 2016 version, but with limited capabilities.  The idea is to code outside the main codebase of NAV and connect your code with hooks into the standard system.  This of course will make upgrade of the base much easier and should in theory also make upgrades of extensions easier.  The code is more modularized and more transparent to handle.  NAV 2017 is supposed to improve extensions significantly and we can sure expect that trend to keep going.

The concept of extensions does fire up some interesting questions.  For example when you need to fire your code inside a standard codeunit, you will only have a limited number of places to have your code executed.  If none of those hooks work for you then you might have issues.  Additionally, I am not sure how you would extend an extension.  I am sure Microsoft is working on those questions and already might have answers.

Obviously with extensions, you can upload you code change to the cloud and improve an existing system without knowing the underlying base code.  Which I assume is the ultimate goal.

iNECTA will be in full swing at the NAV UG summit in Tampa.  Please check us out at booth #1045.

Also, if you are new to NAV, check out the session “Stump the Experts: New 2 NAV” which I am speaking at, Thursday, October 13th 3:00 – 4:15.