Partner Ready Software (PRS) eyes a new challenge: Modernizing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV development environment

The Partner Ready Software (PRS) initiative began in 2011 with an appeal by a handful of Microsoft Dynamics NAV technical experts who wanted to find ways to professionalize the channel's software development efforts.

Now, with many of its initial goals validated by the community and even by Microsoft R&D, the group behind the PRS initiative has new plans to fortify NAV custom development for the future.

Two of the core PRS members have identified another growing challenge for NAV development in Microsoft's current era - modernizing the development environment. The time is right, they say, to get NAV developers off the classic client - long the development environment of choice for NAV - and onto Visual Studio (VS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Such a transition will not be easy, but PRS members Mark Brummel and Soren Klemmensen have taken up the cause with a hands-on approach.

If there was one spark that launched this new chapter for PRS, it was an interchange between Klemmensen and fellow PRS member Eric Wauters, a.k.a. Waldo, at a NAV Directions partner event four years ago. At the time, Klemmensen was already a veteran NAV developer, but wasn't well known to the PRS team.

"Soren is one of the most experienced [developers] in the ecosystem and we met him for the first time when he hijacked one of Waldo's sessions about source code management," recalls Brummel. "He told everyone that TFS was so much better than what was being presented."