Source Control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV - ReVision

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As you might know, I'm one of the partners of a Belgian Dynamics NAV VAR and ISV: iFacto Business Solutions. My role there is "Development Manager". One of the challenges of a Dynamics NAV Development Manager is "keeping control over your development" or better .. "keeping control over all objects at all customers".

The phenomenon "Source Control" is a well know subject in the Development-world. And still today, it's a pain in the a*** in the NAV-world .. .

In my opinion, Source Control should be part of the "development environment" and shouldn't be part of the application. In my dreams, it shouldn't be necessary to modify anything to the application, to import any .fob, any change in the way you develop today ... you know what I mean.. .

I didn't have a solution, and too bad all things out there actually changed the database. I had to import .fobs in all databases .. and above all .. I had to teach my developers with +15 years of experience that they had to change their way of development .. . I tried to sell the idea, but it was difficult..

Until one day, I hired a bright .NET developer (of which I'm not going to reveal the name just yet ... but all credit goes to him) (and with "bright", I mean "Mark Brummel.NET" ;&deg ), who found a way to do it. Together (he being the brains and developer, me being the teaser and tester), we have been working on a Source Control that does all the things above .. and more :-). After about 1108 hours of development, we can say we have a product that's mature enough to be shown to the public .. we have a "beta" .. or how do you kids call it these days.. :-).

In this blog, I would like to show you some "teaser"-movies of what's the tool is probably going to look like (the framework is ready, but the UI is still open for discussion (all feedback is welcome :-))).

What's the idea?

The main idea is being able to manage the changes to all objects in any DEV-environment, with 3 possible systems:

• Microsoft Visual SourceSafe: known for many years now.
• Microsoft Team Foundation Server: The new source control system (and more) of Microsoft
• Windows Folders: just very simple a directory-structure somewhere on your network.

All this from outside NAV, without any object-change, without scanning tables, .. . It has to be easy to setup, easy to configure repositories, easy to add databases, flexible to many repositories (customers, partner, local, on-site, ...) and databases and one environment. Simplicity all the way (like NAV :-)).

First movies are about the Setup of the program. In fact, you see all the setup that is necessary to do sourcecontrol in NAV, and all it lasts is about 3 minutes in total:

1. Setup of ReVision: we're planning to make the installation available through some kind of web-setup .. To be able to keep everyone automatic updated with the lates version of ReVision: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy68wMvBU0A
2. Visual SourceSafe Configuration: we set up a new sourcesafe environment (an existing one is also possible though), and set up ReVision to connect to this Source Control system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3s2WjKvLJc
3. Link Dynamics NAV Database with ReVision: so, set up ReVision to do versioning, source control, ... for a certain database: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9D_bFfaZlc. You have to repeat this step for each database that has to be "sourcecontrolled". We have about 80 databases currently in our setup on Team Foundation Server. Notice that all users that connect to the Repository will benefit from the setup. Once one user sets up a database, all users will see that data and versions.

After this, you're good to go to do your source controlling. In this next movie, some basic source controlling is done: designing an object (therefore automatically checking out the object), saving and checking in the object, comparing two versions of an object ... stuff like that. It also shows how object locking works: by using just the Source Control software. If the object is checked out in Sourcesafe (or TFS, or even file system), the object is locked in NAV for someone else. Here is the movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FC89RQ_eFY .

This is not all, folks .. the fun has just started.. :-). More in the next blog(s)...

Please provide me of any kinds of feedback.. . If anyone might wonder, we're not competing with any tool out there, or at least, that's not the intention at all. We just found a way to do this, and we would like to share it ... how we're going to share it, we don't know yet .. but we'll figure that out in the next couple of months .. ;&deg



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