Preface

Hi, and welcome to the world of Design Patterns. This is how I open my short introductory video about this subject that I made for Microsoft. You can find it on my YouTube page together with more than 15 hours of Patterns content.

This book is about Patterns and clean coding practices. It is about creating software that users will recognize as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, that other developers can maintain, and that is as easy to merge and upgrade as possible with the technology we have today.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and before that, Navision Software, always had a specific footprint. I often call it Navision DNA. It is what makes our beloved product unique and successful.

But what is "it"? What is this Navision DNA? This is the question that we will try to answer in this book. You will find that many answers can be found in the product, dating back to 30 years ago. We will also find some answers in the object-oriented programming best practices and the clean coding concepts.

Together, these form a recipe for writing good software in C/AL—our programming language. Despite the fact that we are not object oriented, we can learn from other initiatives around Patterns and practices.

After reading this book, I hope that you have some fresh ideas, or maybe even recognition that you're already doing a lot of these things in the correct way.