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Perhaps I've missed something but what is about a development environment in Nav 5?
I have seen some Nav 5 presentations with all that modern looking role-based client saying that development stiil be in C/SIDE. But what should we expect from it? Will it have any new features: code highlighting, some kind of intellisense and so on? I think it's time to give us a better IDE.

No.

May be in version... X.

The information we now have is that we will still have to do developing in the old client and deploy to the new client.

There are lot of plans and roumours about the future but nobody knows for sure what will happen.

That's good news, because it hints that the new client will have a completely redesigned IDE after NAV5, maybe in NAV6, possibly a VS plugin like the Reporting Services designer.

However, I think Microsoft should go into a shared source direction - I mean if they would share the source of the C/SIDE IDE with say, 10 of us, two weeks later intellisense and coloring would be developed, and we would be happy to do it for free.

Let's suggest it to Microsoft

You know what, we do not really ask for a lot. There are some small things like highlighting and intellisence. I do not think we need something as advanced as Visual Studio. Just little things which will make the life of the developer a bit more colourful

Actually... there some strange magic with the current C/AL code editor. Just for fun, I tried to write C/AL in Notepad, FAR Manager, Eclipse etc... and I found that I make a LOT more typos than in the C/AL editor. What can be secret? Maybe that the fonts are large and have high contrast shapes and therefore they are more visible than in most applications?

You've got waaaaayy to much free time, man

DeSp,

The NAV 5.0 all of us are talking about has now moved to NAV 5.1. A business decision was made so that the transition period for all involved can be made smoother.

The role-based client that you mentioned will be available from NAV 5.1 onwards. NAV 5.1 is slated for Q4 2007.

However, NAV 5.0 will have the exact same C/SIDE experience as 4.0, and will still use C/AL as well, but with a few extra features (nothing significant to speak of). In fact, C/AL will not be removed from either Wave 1 or Wave 2, and will most likely be a part of NAV 6.0 as well. The reason behind it is that Microsoft does not want to alienate all their loyal partners who's bread and butter is C/AL development, and who's forte is not in programming using VS.NET (specifically C#). In fact, Mogens specifically stated that he does not partners to go and program through VS. In the future, we *may* use a tool similar to VS, however currently there are no plans for this just yet. As of now, the ONLY reason to use Visual Studio with NAV 5.1 is to compile Pages.

To sum up, NAV 5.0 will be more like a large service pack on NAV 4.0, plus the addition of the Page object, and a very nice form export feature to Word and Excel. C/AL will play a major role in NAV for at least another year to come.

But there must be c# functionality in 5.1. At a demo i saw a menu option that said "compile (or convert? dont remember exactly) to c#".

It is just "compile" functionality, which will create the DLL... and this is done through C#....

There will be no C# in 5.1. Development will be done in C/AL, the same editor we use now. The screenshot you saw was a development build that translated C/AL to C# so the developer could import it into Visual Studio manually and compile it there. When we get it, NAV will take C/AL code, translate it to C# and compile it to managed assemblies all behind the scenes. We are not supposed to ever see the actual C# code.

Bummer

Navision is not a development language. It's a tool to configure Navision to meet the requirement of businesses.

If I was Microsoft, I wouldn't spend much resource enhancing the IDE when it's perfectly fine right now. It's designed so business analyst can translate business logic into Navision without having to become a hardcore programmer.

If you want fancy IDEs, Navision is the wrong profession for you.

This is only my speculation, but I suspect Navision's Dev Environment will be:

v5 (2007-2009) - C/SIDE compilable to c#.net that we can't see or modify
v6 (2010-2013) - C/SIDE compilable to Cw that we can see and modify in a limited manner in Sharepoint Studio
v2014 (2014-2015) - Cw that we can see and fully modify in Webput. C/SIDE is discontinued. Navision itself is merged with all other Dynamics apps into a single app simply called Business Dynamics.