I spent the day yesterday at Microsoft’s Irving campus at a demo day required by part-time Microsoft consulting gig. It was interesting, in it own way. Nice to be able to get together with everyone from the consulting gig, most of whom I rarely see in person. Nice to check out MS’s secured offices. Nice cafeteria for lunch.

I got a lot of ribbing for being an “Apple guy.” I had to try very hard to keep a straight face while the Microsoft guy explained how we really needed to watch out when the new Zune comes out this Fall. Um, yea.

I was a sales-oriented demo, specific to Dynamics AX. Not being a sales guy, it was a little lost on me. I spent the last hour implementing a .NET component to embed SQL Reporting Services reports into AX so they could be called from a menu and be more friendly to the user. This “magic” was demo’d as being possible, and I took the cue to figure out how.

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Microsoft has published a wonderful how-to on using the Dynamics AX Business Connector to create sales orders from VB. Only, I feel sorry for you trying to maintain this code if you do it the way they recommend!

It’ll work, yes…but, it’s extremely verbose. Individually setting field values across the .NET/COM connector is a performance hit, but also really difficult to maintain. It also gives you no encapsulation and control of the interface to the external application from inside AX. Please, please, if you are considering doing an external application interface to AX like this, take the time to implement a Gateway.

Typically, I will write a class in X++ with static methods that serves as the Gateway to the external application. Then, my calls into AX will go exclusively through that Gateway. Then I have a way to intervene if there’s some special validation I want to perform on the incoming request — or, say I decide I want the new sales orders from this external application to go into a holding zone before going live — I can implement that in my X++ class without having to recompile and rerelease the external binary.

On the bright side, MS’s screenshots at least demonstrate what a beautiful UI you can make with Windows.Forms.

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In a typical fashion, Microsoft spent a lot of effort integrating a variety of it's new technologies in Dynamic AX 4 (nee Axapta). Often these additions are of questionable benefit to the end-user/customer -- but, the ability to make direct calls to the .NET/CLR from AX's built in X++ language is pretty handy for the developer.

The process is pretty simple. Add a reference in the AOT to your CLR assembly -- or a reference to .NET's "System" namespace is already available. Assert permissions to access the bridge (just a wrapper for Window auth), then make your calls.

You declare your variables in their native CLR types, and use the methods of the CLRInterop class in AX to caste to AX data types. Here's an example to build an AX container of file names in a directory, something trivial in .NET that's actually a bit of a pain with AX's limited built in file/directory methods.

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While most who know me will testify that I'm certifiable, I now have paperwork to prove it. That's right, ladies and gentleman, you are in the presence (in the abstract) of a "Microsoft Certified Business Management Solutions Specialist" -- try to fit that on your business card.

While not really a priority in my book, my work with Clients First made it advantages for reputation and billing rate purposes to gain such a certification in Dynamics AX (nee Axapta) programming. I wouldn't say the test really covered usefully material, and I did only a minimal amount of review -- but managed to just get over the 70% required to pass.

I probably could have done a little better if I bothered to review my answers, but it was about 100 degrees in the testing room, so I zipped through the test in 20 minutes of the 90 allowed and left.

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I've posted a utility String class I wrote years ago for Axapta. I've also compiled and used it in Dynamics AX v4. It extends the rather limited built-in string functions with a number of other common string manipulations and comparisons like "endsWith", "replace", "split", etc.

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I just realized Microsoft has put all the Dynamics AX (nee Axapta) docs on MSDN. That's handy.

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Microsoft Business Solutions is a rudderless ship. Just take a look at the website for their big annual conference, Convergence 2006. I took a look because I am an Axapta users. Axapta is a great ERP package that MBS has run into the ground since acquiring it several years ago.

I also took a look because the conference is in Dallas. I wouldn't consider travelling to it, but I figured since it was local, it might be worth it. But I can't imagine how it would be worth it, because there's a complete lack of any meaningful information on the conference website. It's all marketspeak drivel, nothing concrete. All I could really figure out it that there would be lots of opportunities to network and I'd get to bring home a DVD! Oy.

Perhaps they'll actually ship a new version of Axapta this year as promised (there has been no updates since MBS acquired Axapta). I think this is actually possible only because they've officially renamed the product "Dynamics AX" and they want to get out the new splash screen.

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The new version of website/webstore that I've been doing for work is now "live." It's been largely done and in-use by a handful of customers for several months, but we finally flipped the switch and moved it over the "www" address. It's a custom .NET site, all written in C# that fully integrates with our Axapta ERP backend. Unfortunately, much of the fun stuff is not public as we're only using the webstore features for select customers right now -- stuff like order status, shipment tracking, saved carts, etc.

I am, however, pretty proud of the X-HTML valid, pure CSS layout and printer-friendly product guide that's fully updated daily from our ERP ( with live customer pricing for logged in customers ).

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The two languages I'm currently writing most of my code in at work are C# and X++ (proprietary Axapta language). One thing about the base datatypes is driving me nuts, however. In C#, strings are "string" and booleans are "bool". In X++, strings are "str" and booleans are "boolean".

Doesn't that seem a bit odd? In both languages, one is an abbreviation, the other is the full word...but they are reversed! What's the point? I'm lost on what the language designers were thinking. Why abbreviate? And if you are going to abbreviate, I guess to save typing, why only one?

At any rate, switching back and forth between the languages, this little quirk is leading to a lot of compiler errors...and it's annoying.

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Well, the big upgrade went smoothly. A couple of unexpected issues with the SQL database, but they were easy to fix. Many of the update steps went much quicker than I had expected, too. My time estimates were based on running the upgrades on my laptop, I knew they would be much faster in the production environment, just not how much faster.

So, anyway, I finished up on Saturday...and now I just have to deal with all the unpredictable problems that come up when users actually get to work in it tomorrow. At least it's very easy to replace objects on the fly in Axapta, so repairing little issues doesn't require downtime for anyone.

Wish me luck -- could be a long day tomorrow!

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This weekend I'm going to upgrade our Axapta installation at work from v2.5SP3 to v3.0SP1. It's a pretty big upgrade, primarily because of changes Microsoft/Navision made to the underlying database schema, and the report structure. These changes required me to practically redo many of the modifications I'd made to the system...a process I've been picking away at since April.

At any rate, I'll be here all weekend doing this. And I really mean all weekend. Because of the dramatic db changes, the upgrade takes a long time to process -- plus I have to update all the client machines, and thoroughly test everything. Argh. I hate working on the weekends.

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I'm working on upgrading our Axapta ERP installation to version 3.0...which involves the tedious process of code review and merging my mods with the application changes (which, BTW, is a _lot_ easier in Axapta than in most solutions).

I've been finding myself very validated by doing this update, however, because I keep running into things while diff'ing where I added object methods, etc, and wrote comments to the effect of "This should already be here!" or "Gaping hole!" -- only to find an implementation in the 3.0 version of the code that is almost exactly (if not exactly) what I had added.

Of course, the flip side of that is thinking -- geez, I wasted time implementing something that already should have been there, and now I'm wasting time diff'ing it! But, on the whole, it's nice to know I was on the right track.

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It appears Navision Axapta, the ERP solution I work with at the office, is in danger of becoming Microsoft Axapta. Not too happy about that. Microsoft bought Great Plains Software last year, and appears to working on choking off vitality and competition in the small-to-midsize company ERP business. Gack.

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I've posted my XML-RPC client for Axapta. No one who reads this site has Axapta, so that's probably not that useful to any of you -- but I wanted it to have a home.

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I spent the better part of today doing something I've been meaning to get around to for some time...writing an XML-RPC client for Axapta, the ERP application I program for at work.

I had already laid some of the groundwork, extending wrapper classes for the WinInet API...and Axapta already has wrapper classes for the MS-XML parser, so I really just had to write the construction and deconstrution of messages that cohere to the XML-RPC spec, and the actual HTTP transport routines. It's not done, but it's working for all primitive datatypes now...and structs are supported in outgoing params ( not yet in results )...which means I have enough to communicate w/ Conversant, which is my primary purpose for this.

By letting Axapta and Conversant talk directly, I'm now able to synch contents of things on our Intranet with data in Axapta -- and also automate some of the product catalog information that will be going into our new website ( which will be Conversant based ). I'm very happy about that.

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Wish me luck. We're finally pulling the switch to our new ERP solution, Axapta, at my main gig this weekend. I've got a lot of work invested in this, now it's time to let the users screw it all up.

For me, the data conversion this weekend is the real chore...but it won't be too bad. Luckily I've got real good at hacking around data in SQL Server, so I'll make it work.

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I'm sure all sorts of bad thing could be said about Microsoft's SQL Server -- but at the moment, I'm in love. Why? Because I've just spent my morning going between two extremes of the database software spectrum.

"ALT" is in the process of switching to "Axapta", an ERP solution with a SQL Server backend. I've got all our data imported into SQL -- mostly via Axapta's import tools, but we've been doing a lot of manipulation, and some it wasn't very good data to begin with, so I've been spending the morning insuring consistency. I've been writing some complex SQL scripts that jump around and FETCH relations from all around Axapta's 300+ tables, and update thousands of record -- and I keep think, "Darn, my script can't be right!" because they all execute so fast...but they are right, and they work like a charm.

Mind you, our previous in-house solutions are all in FileMaker, which was never meant to handle the type of abuse we've given it...it proved that when the FileMaker server crashed this morning. It took 45 minutes to relaunch and do consistency checks on all the 102 DBs, and left three of them corrupt -- including the 85 meg Sales Line Items DB, which it then took about 2 1/2 hours to recover so that it could be put back online...and based on my prior Filemaker experience, that DB is still screwed, and I will need to clone a backup and reimport all the records into it ( which will take another 2 1/2 hours ). On top of that, the data manipulations I was doing in SQL -- if they could be done at all in Filemaker -- would take rediculous amounts of time.

At any rate, it's clear that I can't wait to retire Filemaker.

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Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow I'm in classes on using "Axapta", the new ERP solution we're working on implementing at "ALT".

9-4 is too long to be in a class. It's just difficult to pay attention...of course, it's kinda boring for me, too...because it's end-user training -- ie, how to write up orders, handle inventory transactions, etc. -- but it's stuff I'll need to know since I'm the answer guy.

Five others from work make up the class, each from different areas, and they're all a bit intimidated by the depth and complexity of the new software, but they'll catch on -- it's mostly a matter of familiarity.

At least it's nice that I'm getting praise for how easy many things are to do in our current systems, which I built, relative to Axapta.

What I built doesn't have near the depth of Axapta, and the Filemaker infrastructure it's built on is crumbling -- but at least from a user perspective many areas of the solution are competitive or better than those of the $100,000 ERP solution. That's pretty nice to hear.

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The search committee at "ALT" has accepted my recommendations, and we're now making final arrangments to purchase "Axapta" as our new ERP solution. The wheels are rolling and we're aiming for a complete transition to the new software by Jan. 1. I've got two beefy servers and a batch of desktops on order from Dell...they'll replace a bunch of iMacs to run the new system. One server will run SQL Server and the Axapta Object Server, the other will handle the more mundane aspects of the Windows network (File and Print services, Active Directory Controller, etc.)

I'm actually pretty happy about it all. Like any large solution like this, I'm sure they'll be plenty to hate about it -- but there's also lots to like. It's built on good technology, has a very flexible and advanced development environment, and exposes it's core to external apps through DCOM.

Talk about a shopping spree...in hardware and software ( initial purchases, more will follow no doubt ), I just spent $130,000 -- essentially in one day!

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