Dynamics NAV 2009 contains a new subsystem for dealing with Web Services. This feature has been well received by partners and customers alike. Partners have expressed interest in having web services available for earlier versions of Dynamics NAV. This feedback resulted in a technology talk at Directions2007 in Florida, where the topic was what could be done to day. The conclusion of the talk was that everything we where intending to deliver was already possible today, yes some code is needed but strictly from function/feature perspective all of it is possible, and it is not even all that ugly. Dynamics NAV 2009 will provide out-of-the-box programmatic web service access to the application and will therefore remove the need for this additional technology plumbing described here.

I have to say that the response to my talk has been tremendous. After the response to my talk on Web Services in NAV 5.0 and previous versions I decided to write this blog post and make the source files available.

This post is about how to bridge the gap between the need for web services now and the current platform, it will help you understand how you can provide Web Services directly from Dynamics NAV today, in a “simple” and flexible way, already today.

To work with the samples in this post you will need: Visual Studio 2005, Dynamics NAV 5.0 and .Net 3.0 installed on your system. This sample should work on Dynamics NAV 4.0 to but has not been tested on that version.