Directions US 2009

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Directions US 2009 is over – running from 11/10 – 11/14 with a serious of deep dive sessions on Saturday. The entire event was professionally executed and the quality of everything was just great. A huge congratulations to the comity on this event, a huge congratulations to the partner community for having these events and a huge thank you from Microsoft for inviting us to be part of this.

I had the pleasure of hosting 3 sessions – one on “What’s new in NAV 2009SP1 for the developer” and 2 deep dive sessions on Web Services as the 2 final sessions on Saturday, and we actually had a pretty good number of people staying for these very last sessions.

So how did it go?

I liked the session survey’s! They had a question called: “Do I want to see this speaker again next year?” – which instead of trying to analyze other responses gives a direct indication of whether I will plan a trip to San Diego next year – I actually don’t know whether or not we will get the survey results…

If I where to grade my own performance, I would probably give me a B- for the What’s new session and an A for my deep dive sessions. When starting the What’s new session, I had a section prepared about what’s new for the user, but the majority of this was already shown in the Keynote. I decided to ask how many people attended the keynote on Tuesday – and then quickly go over the demo for the people that did NOT attend the keynote, so I did…

“How many people did NOT attend the Keynote?”

was the question – and only one single person raised his hand… (which actually was my own Manager in Microsoft – so I knew that shouldn’t do a what’s new for the user for him alone). This totally took me by surprise me and I ended up finalizing my session 10 minutes early.

The deep dive sessions went better – people where active asking questions and understanding things and I had absolutely no problem filling out 2 hours talking about Web Services – without just repeating things that everybody have seen before. The majority of the audience knew about Web Services and had also tried using Web Services before – that was very good.

I wanted to do a recording of the session and make it available here – that did not work for me. Instead I said that I would post info about all the different areas covered in the session on my blog (BTW – I was happy to see, that the majority of the audience knew my blog). The things covered in my session, which you will see as posts on my blog are:

  • Codeunit web services and data types
  • Page web services and filters
  • Extending page web services
  • Using XMLports to read and write data
  • What Company to use
  • Using NAV Web Services from
    • PHP
    • Java
    • C#
    • VB
    • VBScript
    • Javascript
    • Silverlight
    • Mobile
    • C/AL
  • Edit In Excel R2 (I actually promised that long time ago)
  • Synchronize A/D users to NAV

In the session I only had samples in PHP and Java – I will write up a end-to-end scenario and implement this in all these languages/platforms so that people can overcome the initial connection/interaction problems when using NAV Web Services.

A lot of things to do – so I better get going…

Enjoy

Freddy Kristiansen PM Architect
Microsoft Dynamics NAV