Microsoft Dynamics Profile: NAV MVP adds community role to development roots

Microsoft Dynamics NAV MVP Gunnar Gestsson has been a programmer since boyhood. He owned his first computer when he was 13, and quickly began to program data-handling applications. Jump ahead a couple of decades, and he is hard at work as a developer at Microsoft partner Advania, which is headquartered in Reykjavík, Iceland.

He has similarly "grown up with" Microsoft Dynamics NAV. After university, Gestsson got a job working with an old IBM system, then he developed Visual Basic office solutions on top of that IBM system and in 1994 started developing in Navigator, the DOS version of Dynamics NAV. A couple of years later, he began working for a company that went through several iterations and was ultimately acquired by Advania in 2003, where he has worked since.

Despite the product evolution from Navigator to Navision to newer versions of Dynamics NAV, and now Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gestsson says "It's always been easy for me just to read the standard code which is delivered by financials and understand what it's doing and see how [Microsoft] is doing things and coming up with other ways to do similar things," he says. "The code itself and how things are set up and works is basically just like reading English to me."

A background in economics

"I am an economist - I haven't studied any computer science - so I know how business is done," says Gestsson. He earned his degree in Economics from the University of Iceland in 1994.

"I know accounting and I know all those basics to run an ERP system and ...