Microsoft Dynamics NAV Director Offers NAV 7 Screenshot Sneak Peek

Microsoft Dynamics NAV consultant and blogger Mark Brummel made us aware of a new sneak preview of the NAV 7 Object Designer, revealed on Mibuso today by Microsoft director of development for Dynamics NAV, Michael Nielsen. 

Nielsen titled his post "Forms, Classic reports, Dataports and Classic database R.I.P" and prefaced his biggest news with an acknowledgment of the significant changes that NAV 7 has unleashed on the previous architecture:

"Classic forms, reports and dataports has been around since 1995 and a lot of people (including me) has had a hard time understand that they will be gone in V7. In V7 they are replaced by more mordern [sic] concepts: Pages, RDL reports and XML-port, which will now include dataport functionality.

The classic runtime and database is also gone, which enables C/AL to run 100% managed on .net with full Unicode support for data."

He goes on to acknowledge the "huge changes" coming in NAV 7 and Microsoft's commitment to prepare its developer community:

"We know that these are huge changes to Dynamics NAV and we are planning a number of readiness activities globally to make sure that you all get an opportunity the [sic]get up to speed with NAV 7 beafore [sic] the launch!"

Included in the post was this screenshot of an early version of the new ObjectDesigner (original image on Mibuso.com here).