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Wrapping up Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference 2011 Deepak Kumar, Senior Program Manager, presented the data upgrade framework in AX 2012.

Data upgrade is an intrinsic difficult subject to demonstrate in a breakout session. “Seeing is believing”, and Deepak had invested the time in preparing no less than six AX instances each at a different stage in the data upgrade process. With this setup Deepak was able to demonstrate all the improvements at various points in the data upgrade process. I’ve had the pleasure of presenting with Deepak a few times in the past. I know how much attention he pays to detail, and how much time he spends preparing just his slideshow. With this setup I will not even guess how much time Deepak has invested in helping us understand the data upgrade process in AX 2012. As one of the 400+ attendance in the audience, I felt I got spoiled. Thank you Deepak!

“Fear – Challenged – Rewarded – Joy” is the emotional evolution you go through during the data upgrade process.

Fear is the naturally emotion that kicks in when you are facing a big unknown change. To reduce the fear an Upgrade Readiness tool will be available. You install this tool on your live AX4/2009 system. The tool offers a lot of benefits. First, it enables you to verify that the data in your live system can be upgrade. For example, if an optional column is being converted to an mandatory column, and your current production data has <blank> contents in the field – then the data upgrade is bound to fail. In the past you discovered issue like this much later in the process – you could call it trial-n-error. This pre-verification allows you to fix your data on your live production system before starting the actual upgrade.

Challenged replaces fear, as you now know you are in good hands. The Upgrade Readiness tool will secondarily enable you to enter data that is required to run AX2012. In the past you would be entering this type data after the actual data upgrade but still during the downtime. Now you can enter the data up-front while the system is live. It is a quite comprehensive amount of data you need to provide, covering global address book, site, financial dimensions, organizational model etc. Next the Upgrade Readiness tool allows you to copy live data to a staging area. It will be doing data transformations in the process, and the idea is to lower the complexity (and thus execution time) for the upgrade scripts that needs to run during the downtime. This process is of course delta-based, so any updates happening in the live system can be reapplied to the staging area. You can even control how much of your live system’s resources should be used for this, e.g. you may only want to use 0% during peak hours, 20% during night time, and 40% in the weekends.

On the AX 2012 installation you can connect to the live production system. The upgrade process now schedules the actual upgrade scripts based on the distribution of the actual data you have. You can of course tweak the prioritizes of the scripts. At this point you have completed about 80% of the data upgrade process, and now is the time to take the system offline to do the actual data copy/transformation. Reward is in sight.

True joy is when the upgrade is completed, and you uninstall the upgrade model. The upgrade model contains all the DEL_ tables/fields/indexes, and as you don’t need them anymore – you might as well remove them completely from your system. This way your developer experience on the system gets much improved. Take a look here:

Let me wrap up my coverage of the Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference 2011 with a quote I heard yesterday: “AX is like Hotel California – once you get there, you can never leave!”

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I have to confess… this will be my second Convergence
experience as a presenter, and despite the excitement of being a part of such a
large event there are always those little unknowns that make me nervous.  However, one advantage I may have over a good
number of you is the fact that I am an Atlanta local (well, been living here
for over 3 years) and can find myself a place to relax and have some great food
after a long day of running around at the Convention Center.

After all, Convergence is more than just the sum of its keynotes
and sessions.  It is a major event for
the entire Microsoft Dynamics community, and the value you get out of it is
based on the right attitude, good planning, and community awareness as much as
it is related to which sessions you re…

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For project-based manufacturing and construction, the right
tools are not just on site or in the plant, they are also in your company’s
software.  The right Microsoft Dynamics
ERP solution for project teams should manage risk, reduce errors, increase
visibility, and enable managers and executives to use their expertise to make
the right decisions at the right time. 
As projects grow in complexity, reliable access to accurate project data
will maximize both the performance and quality of project teams and external
vendors. And capitalizing on currency and commodity fluctuations will shift
from an unforeseeable threat to a manageable risk.

The results of a recent executive survey of industrial
manufacturers by the Economist Intelligence Unit (<a href="http://www…

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Yesterday at Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference 2011 Peter Villadsen, Senior Program Manager gave one of his best performances ever. Anyone who have seen Peter live in the past knows what this statement carries. And it certainly didn’t hurt, that Peter had excellent news to share with us.

Peter is a dear friend of mine, a top professional program manager, and a class entertainer. In his own laid-back, eloquent and well-articulated manner Peter owns the room and the audience’s attention. Peter’s presentation took place in the Kodiak room – the largest of the rooms we use for breakout sessions at the Microsoft Conference Center. It seats 400 people, and many more were standing along the walls – including me. Peter masters the English language to an extend where it is impossible to tell (and believe) that he is actually a native Dane. Over the course of the years I’ve had the pleasure of traveling with Peter to Italy, Spain and France – and I can testify that Peter also masters these dialects of the human linguistic. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Peter works in our Language team.

The session’s title were: “Developing in .NET Managed Code and other X++ enhancements”. Based on that title no one expected to find such fine jewels in the treasure chest. Peter started by going through some of the “minor” improvements in the X++ language in Dynamics AX 2012. These includes:

1. New AS and IS keywords – with the same semantics as in C#. In X++ they work for class and table types.
2. Support for Attributes – just like in C#.
3. Table inheritance.
4. Tightening up of various language constructs. X++ no longer allows return type covariance, return type contravariance, parameter covariance, parameter contravariance, and visibility contravariance. This fully aligns X++ with C#. To explain this in less language-savvy terms, it means an overriding method must have the same return type and parameters as the method it is overriding. Further; it cannot reduce the visibility, e.g. it cannot make a public method private.
5. The dangling semi-colon is not required anymore. The spontaneous applause was much appreciated.

As if the above in itself was not enough to warrant a new release – Peter moved on to the real topic: X++ as a managed languages.

The BC.NET component has been re-engineered. In Dynamics AX 2009 it is basically a face-less client that allows the managed world to call into the AX stack. The X++ code in AX 2009 can call out into the managed world using interop. Notice that when you call out into managed code, you cannot call back into the same AX session. I.e. no round-tripping. In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 this is changed. The new BC.NET component is a now thin conversion layer that can attach itself (in-process) to the AX client(s), the AOS and regular managed code. It will ensure all marshaling and type conversions happen seamlessly between the two realms. Peter demonstrated this by having a X++ class pass itself to a C# class, and let the C# class change the state of the object, by invoking a method on the X++ class. It just worked exactly like you would expect.

But wait – there is even more. In Dynamics AX 2012 we are compiling X++ code to the CLR. At compile time we generate an XML representation of the pcode, which we can convert into IL. At run-time we will be executing the IL for batch jobs, service calls and RunAs constructs. (RunAs is a new method allowing you to request the X++ logic to be executed as IL.). Peter demonstrated how the performance characteristics are vastly different particular in situations with extremely many objects or extremely many methods calls. Even in less-extreme situations running X++ as IL is beneficial as for example it reduces the time database locks are held, and thus improves performance and scalability.

Peter started the session by quoting Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-changin’ - I believe everyone in the audience agreed.

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Microsoft has been short on new public announcements so far this
week at the Microsoft
Dynamics AX Technical Conference, but one tidbit of some interest is the official
name of AX "6" – now known to the world as Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. 

This week’s conference in Redmond sold out with 1000
partners and customers attending, according
to Microsoft Dynamics ERP marketing director Guy Weismantel.

Last week, Microsoft announced
some high level architectural updates…

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The overall theme in the key-note was “The general shift in ERP“. Crispin Read, General Manager, joined Hal on stage explaining how we are doing things differently in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

The key-note was action packed with over 45 minutes of product demos. Hal invited several team members on stage to demonstrate new capabilities in Dynamics AX 2012.

The very first demo was conducted by Lachlan Cash, Senior Product Manager (and the driving force behind this Conference). Lachlan demonstrated the model driven development in Microsoft Visual Studio and MorphX. He showed how changes in one environment immediately are available in the other – because they are both driven from the same SQL based repository. He continued by showing how the new concept of Models allows having business logic from multiple source in the same layer – or simply modularizing your code, as the tool sets natively support models directly in the IDEs.

The next presenter on stage was Kyle Young, Principal Program Manager Lead. Kyle showed some of the many new application abstractions available in Dynamics AX 2012. Using the Enterprise Portal, where forms are driven from the same form definition as in the rich client, he showed the powerful application features built on top of Organizational Models, Workflow, Date Effectiveness, Categorization, Dimensions, Policies and Work On Behalf. 

Tom Patton, Senior Program Manager, showed the new User Experience in the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 client, and how it seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office Excel, allowing you to query data from AX, and join it with arbitrary other data sources, pivot, edit and format the data in Excel, before posting it back into AX, and finally using SQL Server Reporting Services to generate an interactive (and very appealing) report of the data from within AX.

The demos were followed by an ISV Panel consisting of Bob Hadingham, Platform Director LexisNexis, Jeff Green, CTO Tyler and Cornelius Bosch, CEO ToIncrease. They each in turn explained what Dynamics AX 2012 means for their businesses.

Let me wrap up this post by quoting one of my favorite performing artists: “It’s the end of the world as we know it – and I feel fine”, Michael Stipe – R.E.M.

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My flight was full of familiar faces. Homeland Security in Seatac learned that Microsoft is hosting a Dynamics AX Conference. So did the receptionists at my hotel. Almost everyone at the breakfast buffet was wearing a Dynamics AX logo. The weather is warm. You can smell the pine wood surrounding the area and you can feel the anticipation building up. Today is  the day! In just 3 hours the registration for the Dynamics AX 2011 Technical Conference 2011 will open. Welcome to Redmond and Microsoft Campus – my home away from home.

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When Zila Inc., a
dental products manufacturer, decided to seek a solution to use the web to sell
its products, including the Rotadent Professional Powered Brush, directly to
consumers, the company knew it needed a something that easily integrated with
Microsoft Dynamics GP. 

But finding such a solution at a reasonable cost was
not an easy proposition, according to Albert Bachman, Director, Management Information
Systems at Zila. "When we were looking for a solution we were looking for
something that would connect to Dynamics GP and we found a very limited number
of people that could do that," he said. "Initially some of these solutions we
looked at were tens of thousands of dollars and we didn’t have that kind…

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Solugenix Partners with Dynamics Software to Offer Service Management Solutions
for Microsoft Dynamics AX

Solugenix
Corporation, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, has announced a partnership
with Dynamics Software, a 100%
dedicated Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV), to deliver Service
Management to their customers.

Adding Service Management to the Solugenix’s Microsoft
Dynamics AX solutions improves the company’s commitment to augment the
out-of-the-box Dynamics AX functionality to closely match each company’s unique
processes and customer requirements, according to the companies.

"This partnership was established to carry out our
…

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Many chemical manufacturers track the lot attributes for specific lots of their purchased and manufactured materials.  When using lot numbers to identify unique lots of a product, the actual value of a lot attribute may be used to support several critical business needs.  For example, it may be compared to the acceptable range of values in determining material disposition, or in generating a certificate of analysis. In the context of sales orders, it may be used to reserve a specific lot that meets customer specifications.  The concept of reserving a specific lot also applies to a production ingredient and to a requested transfer between sites. 

For chemical manufacturers using or considering Microsoft Dynamics AX, it’s vital to understand the lot attribute capabiliti…

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