by Brandon Taylor

I was asked a question the other day, “What makes Navigator 2009 so much different then 5.0?”

What a perfect question to spawn this blog topic about Navigator 2009 from a development perspective! Over the next couple months I am going to attempt to break down this question and provide some development insight for each of the core areas related to Navigator 2009:

1. Role-tailored experience
2. Native web services
3. New 3-tier architecture

Today, let’s look at the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) where programmers spend their time creating the role-tailored experience.

The role-tailored client, RTC as we like to refer to it, is a windows client that was developed with the goal of improving the poor user experience (UX) associated with ERP systems.  There are lots of articles and whitepapers that outline the benefits of this RoleTailored design, but I think the implementation of the IDE in 2009 deserves some discussion to help existing clients understand what type of changes Microsoft has made that impacts developers as they plan to upgrade.

As with all things Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the development mantra is “simplicity”.  If it isn’t simple, then it typically does not make it in product.  This has held true with the IDE in 2009.  At the most basic conceptual level there are only three new objects a programmer has to learn (only one of them is truly new):

• roles and activities
• menusuites for the RTC
• pages

You might ask why Microsoft didn’t release an IDE built as part of Visual Studio or replace C/AL with C# as many people predicted while 2009 was under development (believe me they researched it).  There are now over 76,000+ customers and 3,600 partners (last count) worldwide using various add-ons and verticals based on the NAV development platform.  I suspect in keeping the IDE the same and only introducing three new concepts, customers along with partners can focus on what’s important – their mission.

As an embedded Microsoft ISV (independent software vendor), we at Serenic appreciate the “simplicity” mantra and that Microsoft takes care of the underlying framework components where most of the complexity resides.  It increases our ability to empower your mission by delivering operational functionality allowing you to operate more efficiently.

Next up, I am going to do a little deeper dive on roles and activities, menusuites, and pages so we can technically understand how these work.  Stay tuned!

Brandon Taylor is Serenic’s VP of Product Development and Strategy.