What’s new in Dynamics NAV 2009?

One of the major changes is that now Dynamics NAV 2009 is a three-tier solution.

It comes with 2 clients – Dynamics NAV Classic, which is equal to the “old” clients, and the new Role Tailored client.

As a developer, you will mainly be using the Classic client, because all changes have to be done in the classic client.

So what’s new in the Classic client?

In the Object Designer you will now find Page. A Page is equal to a form seen from a users point of view – except, that Pages is used by the Role Tailored client, where as a form is used by the Classic client. A Page object is basically an XLM object that determines the layout of the page content.

If we take a look on the C/AL Editor, you will see that colors now are used. Yeah! Finally its starts to look like a real editor 🙂 Unfortunately that seems to be all 😐 No more features have been added – I wonder when they will be adding the ReFactory possibility or go to definition – it would be nice to have these possibilities.

The debugger is the same as in the earlier versions, so no changes have been done here.

So – what about new commands?

No changes to the Table, the Form and Data port Designer.

Report has now 2 new functions SAVEASPDF and SAVEASEXCEL – which now gives us the possible to save the out come of a Report to xls and pdf :-). Furthermore if you have Visual Studio Report Designer installed, you will be able to redesign the Reports. This gives you the possibility to add charts, graphs, tables etc.

To XML Port has been added the possibility to call RUN from a code unit. Furthermore has the functions SETRESPONSE and GETRESPONSE been removed, and the Properties FILENAME and IMPORTFILE has been added.

When creating a new Menu in the Menu Suite, you must now choose what it is design for – Classic Client or Role Tailored Client. But so far it is the only changes I can see that is made here.

…and then of course all the new functions belonging to PAGE object.

Furthermore a Form Transformation Tool has been aded, which can be used to “convert” existing forms to pages.

Dynamics NAV 2009 now supports Web Services, which means that you will be able to expose pages and code units as Web services.

This was what I have found until now 🙂 There is properly more to discover – so the Dynamics NAV 2009 adventure will continue….