Directions US – San Diego

When I write this, I’m on the plane to Frankfurt. No, that’s not where Directions US will take place – I will get my connecting flight to San Diego from there. And San Diego IS the place to be for the next week! Why? Because we live in exciting times when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics NAV! Yes, I still call it NAV – because at this very point, it’s one of the last times I can call it that. Probably for my next blogpost, I’ll be talking about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – yes, also for on premise topics :-).

Lots of exciting sessions – too much to name them all. But obviously, my focus is Development (yes, it’s with a capital :-)). And in terms of Development, it’s already widely known we are facing quite a challenge by moving to a new Development environment, with a new Development paradigm with “extensions”. This usually also comes with new Development team management skills or Development methodology and Development patterns. New ways for “clean coding”. New new new new… . So, tell me, if you’re not going to Directions – are you really serious about Microsoft Dynamics NAV / Business Central? 😉 Don’t worry, next month, there is Directions EMEA – you can get the same content there as well!

My Directions

I will be quite busy this Directions as well. Which I like – don’t get me wrong. I like exchanging experience and knowledge. And I deliberately don’t use the word “share” as that’s a one-way word imho .. . The community gives me back at least as much as I share with it ;-). I learn at least as much at these conferences as I share (oops, now I used it) … . In this particular conference, I will be hunting down some experiences / do’s / don’ts regarding “CI/CD”. With my team at iFacto, and Cloud Ready Software we have been setting this up, it works like a charm – and now I want to see what the community is doing in that field :-). Freddy announced in a tweet he has some scripts he will share with the community about this – so I’m very excited about that (and have high expectations, Freddy ;-))

But there is obviously a lot more to “hunt” for … . I will have 2 2-hour workshops and 2 1-hour sessions:

    • This workshop clearly has a strong focus on developing Extensions. But – don’t want to go into the basics. There are other workshops that cover the basics. I wanted to go in the somewhat “less” known areas when covering Extensions. Now, there are a lot. So I chose to give some hands-on experience covering these topics:
      • How to initialize your app in SCM – what to commit, what not
      • Some tips on my VSCode Extension that helps you during your development
      • Lists & Dictionaries – which is new in AL
      • Some more about debugging and event recording
      • How to do dependencies
      • How to create a test-app
    • Again, a self-paced hands-on workshop that focuses less on extensions, but more on VSCode. It should get you more productive with VSCode, while coding extensions. Again, lots of topics to cover, but I chose for:
      • Source Control Mgt with Git. How to set it up, and how to initialize a repo
      • Configurability, including snippets
      • Some interesting AL Extensions – and how to use them
      • Creating your own VSCode extension to distribute your snippets
    • This is a session – again about development for apps. This time, I will go into what I think you should do for keeping your code clean. I will cover coding guidelines, settings, naming conventions, patterns, tools that help us with clean coding, … .
    • Probably the weirdest session of them all. I will basically be talking about me 😉 – why I do what I do. Now, people that know me, also know I hate talking about myself … (it has been driving my parents crazy for as long as I know …), so I don’t know how this session will go ;-). I prepped all others, but not this one ;-). Well, I know my tools, so I should be able to talk about them quite easily ;-). In any case, I’m planning to cover things like a few of my powershell scripts, my VSCode extension (this time, I will cover the technical part – things I struggled with, and reuseable parts you can use in your own VSCode extension), the (maybe not so) ancient “waldonavpad”, .. and what not ;-). Interesting? I’ll sure do my best ;-).

Last but not least, there is a session called “Meet your MVPs“, which we did last year as well, and turned out to be quite an interesting Chalk ‘n Talk / Town Hall session, where attendees can fire challenging questions to the MVP’s, and we answer them with our own opinions.

Of course they are somewhat overlapping – it’s all Development – but as you can see, the focus is always different .. .

Looking forward to see everyone I know – and everyone I don’t know yet!

See you there!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.waldo.be/2018/09/27/directions-us-san-diego/

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