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Dynamics AX on the iPad: From Brandon George: "The iPad is a great platform that if targeted right can help your company extend and build upon it’s dynamics ax investment, including the windows azure cloud platform… a company can have the iPad for internal and external application use, even if it’s just a 3 person shop. How is this you ask? Well for one, let’s take and say the company has a desire to connect with outside customers, vendors and employees. Let’s say also the company would like to have their product catalog running on he iPad and iPhone in a native application. (html5 talks aside f…

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Although imperfect, one way to
compare the relative popularity of competing software platforms in specific
geographic regions is to track and compare their respective job markets.  And a new website, Job Graphs, does just that.

With a series of measurements
and graphs, Job Graphs reports on the number of open jobs for competing ERP,
EAI, CRM and virtualization applications as well as programming languages and
operating systems skills. It also shows where the jobs are located, the
experience and additional skills required and the average salaries offered.

Microsoft Dynamics products are
right in the mix, with stats for Dynamics AX, NAV, GP and CRM.  Here are some of the figures recently pulled
from the site:
</…

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The document contains specific questions and answers in relation to the removal of Demand Planner 1.0 and 2.0 for Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics NAV from the Microsoft Price Lists.
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For Microsoft Dynamics Partners:Customer evidence and references are critical to winning new Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM deals. A variety of partner-ready tools designed to facilitate the sales process, are available to you for download on Partnersource.
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We were getting this error frequently last week on our DEV AOS box. Every 2 minutes the AOS used to go down with this entry in the event viewer (screenshot below)

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Metal manufacturers have long been forced to fit their complex processes and requirements into uniform ERP systems, according to public accounting and consulting firm Crowe Horwath LLP.  To address these shortcomings they have introduced the Crowe Metals Industry Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics® AX solution.

Dubbed an “industry accelerator”, this solution is specifically designed to meet the needs of metals industry players including producers, processors, fabricators and service centers, so it requires less customization and can be implemented quickly.

"In the past, metals manufacturers wanting to implement a strategic ERP platform were generally forced to settle on a solution that didn’t address t…

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Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM applications are gushing
forth huge amounts of data, but painfully large amounts of that data aren’t
being effectively used to solve management challenges.

As a result, many Dynamics users want more value from their transactional data.
In a recent survey of nearly 432 Dynamics users carried out by MSDynamicsWorld.com
and published by Zap Technology,
more than three-fourths (76%) said they need to improve analytical capabilities
to remain competitive. They acknowledge the wealth of data that exists, but
that improvements are needed to gain access to this data for sophisticated,
on-demand analysis.

The survey, which was carried out in April, showed Dynamics
users encountering a n…

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As a broad platform provider, Microsoft both develops its own solutions for partners and customers and encourages ISV development on its platform. Microsoft appreciates Infor’s commitment to the Microsoft platform as one of our many ISV partners, and we will continue to compete with Infor from a business applications perspective. We are confident in the strong value proposition that we offer customers.
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Beginning July 1, 2011, Microsoft will align the internal fiscal calendar to the external reporting calendar.  Partners, as a part of Microsoft sales rhythms, are being notified of this adjustment to provide lead time to assess any potential impacts.
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C# 4.0 which recently has been released introduces a new static type with the name dynamic. The semantic of declaring a variable as dynamic is to defer all type checking from compile-time to run-time.  This feature doesn’t enable new run-time capabilities, but it certainly makes your code more readable – especially when you interacting with not-strongly-typed languages, such as javascript or dynamic languages.

Consider this example in C#. The example uses reflection to invoke a named method – “Add” in this case. There is no enforcement at compile time, i.e. there is no guarantee that obj has an “Add” method that takes 2 ints as parameters and return an int. Further, which is the point of this discussion, the example contains quite a lot of glue code, which obscures the intention.

  1: using System;

  2: using System.Reflection;

  3:

  4: class Class1

  5: {

  6:     static void Main(string[] args)

  7:     {

  8:         object obj = <some constructor>;

  9:         object[] parameters = new object[] { 2, 5 };

 10:         Type type = obj.GetType();

 11:         int res = (int)type.InvokeMember("Add",

 12:                BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, obj, parameters);

 13:         Console.Write("Result: {0}", res);

 14:     }

 14: }

Now, let us rewrite the example to use the dynamic type. Notice how the intention is crystal clear. You still don’t get compile-time checking – but hey, you didn’t have that before either.

  1: using System;

  2:

  3: class Class1

  4: {

  5:     static void Main(string[] args)

  6:     {

  7:         dynamic obj = <some constructor>;

  8:         int res = obj.Add(2, 5);

  9:         Console.Write("Result: {0}", res);

 10:     }

 11: }

There is, of course, much more to this feature in C#. For example, you are able to control how the runtime checking behaves, and how the late-bound invocation is implemented.

So far so good – but what does that have to do with X++?  Well, X++ is a strongly typed language – like C#; and like in C# you sometimes need to call into weakly typed objects. In AX forms, reports and datasets are weakly typed (i.e. they are not known to the X++ type system). So since the very first version of AX we have had the challenge of bridging this gap – without ruining the code readability.

The interesting thing is that we in 1996 came up with the same solution to this problem, namely: Create a static type that instructs the compiler to relax all checks on operations on variables of the type. The C# solution is in many ways cleaner, more flexible and more robust – but the main principle of the solution is the same. You may already have guessed the X++ solution, but here it is: Types declared as object are not subject to compile time checking. This is of course an overloading of the object semantics – object is also the root base type of all classes. 

Here is an X++ example, similar the C# examples above:

  1: static void LateBindingJob(Args _args)

  2: {

  3:     object obj = <some constructor>;

  4:     int res = obj.Add(2, 5);
  5:

  6:     info(strfmt("Result: %1", res));

  7: }

Call me a geek – but it makes me happy when the two languages converge.

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