Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2012 Services – Book Review

Thanks to Packt  for asking me to review their book and I appreciate the author Klass Deforche and Kenny Saelen for their outstanding work.

Who should read it ?

Its very helpful for all AX users new to the Services world, for developers who work on integrating Ax to external systems and for ISV developers who are extending Ax through their non-ax based Add-on’s.

What can i take out of it ?

With AX 2012, SOA is slowly getting augmented to core of AX and using Services is extremely significant for developers and  a book that focuses on the Services aspect is need of the hour. This is a handy book that can be a quick and effective read.The beginning of this book unveils the key concepts of Service Architecture and Deployment  followed by a deep dive into different types of Services ranging from Document services to System services. Every topic is accompanied with necessary screenshots and code examples making it easier to understand. Topics like SysOperationFramework/Document Services  are exhaustively covered explaining Custom controllers and Custom UI builders. The AIF Document services in this book explains key concepts like Creating, updating ,deploying and consuming a document service. You can find below the TOC of the book

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Services
Chapter 2: Service Architecture and Deployment
Chapter 3: AIF Document Services
Chapter 4: Custom Services
Chapter 5: The SysOperation Framework
Chapter 6: Web Services
Chapter 7: System Services

Overall: The book is well organized  with  an how- to -do approach through out, It not only helps developers new to services but  also experts who build integration products.

Rating: 3.5/5   Click here to order the book   http://bit.ly/137yTni,

 

Dynamics Ax 2012 Security How To – Book Review

Packt has recently come up with a Security How-To book to followup it’s Ax2012 releases.

 

Thanks to Packt for asking me to review their book and I appreciate the author Ahmed Mohamed Rafik Moustafa for his work.

First of all, this is not the regular books that keeps you stay away from reading by the sheer numbers of page. I like the fact that Packt is trying to come up with more shorter series that are interesting and easier to read. The security How To is a Hand book with less pages and more content. It is something that you can tap on to your smart devices, start reading on your way to meet your client and be fully prepared.

The book inclines more towards administrators and consultants but it still dedicates few of the topics to the hard core developers who double as consultants. Segregation of duties to meet Sox Compliance or similar standards was not at least a cake walk with the previous versions of Dynamics Ax. Ax 2012 has made it much easier for functional users/administrators to carry out this operation, but that also means that you need to understand this new framework.  For that matter this book can come handy to get you prepared to face this new framework.

Right now Packt is running a offer and you will be able to buy this book for a little more than a dollar and i definitely recommend that you do it, since the take away from it is worth it. Click here to buy it

Also pre-order the upcoming book on Ax2012 Services by Klass Deforche and Kenny Saelen

 

 

Dynamics AX 2012 Enterprise Portal Development Cookbook

The EP team @Microsoft has come up with a wonderful 160 page cook book for EP Development. The book is free and you can download as is from here EP Cook book

The book authored by Mey Meenakshisundaram and Anees Ansari talks on User Interfaces, Datasources and Datasets, Frameworkcontrols. The framework controls gives you in depth understanding of each control with clear code examples. This is followed by a detailed explanation of the list and detail pages covering the different elementary methods. There is also an advanced section for the list and detailed page that gets deeper through topics such as List page interaction. Then goes on to detail more on the general development concepts related to EP like Sessions, Metadata, Pages, FIlters, lookups and more. The book ends with a brief on the Sharepoint integration from Enterprise search.

The book is exhaustive, informative and is filled with several code examples that you can use. Thanks to the Microsoft EP team for a wonderful book that is definitely going to help us much more than expected.

Click here to read the original post EP book blog post

Download the book here EP Cook book

Clash of the Titans – SAP Vs Oracle Vs Dynamics Ax

Panorama consulting one of the leading ERP consulting firm has come up with it’s latest independent comparison study of Tier – 1 ERP systems. The study is an outcome of inputs from 2000+ Respondent’s from 65 country. While i leave the rest of the details to the report, I will highlight strengths of Dynamics Ax the report discusses.

It has lauded Ax for

• Ease of customization
• High flexibility
• Ease of integration
• Familiarity of user interface

Functional strengths include:
• Strong inter- and multi-company support
• Strong multicurrency and localization capabilities
• Data dimension-enabled tracking of physical moves (inventory, etc.) and financial transactions
• Strong MRP and trade capabilities

The report indicates a lower short list percentage for Ax, it has identified that the selection percentage is the highest. While the implementation is shortest of all the big three and has a faster ROI.

The report is concise and precise to the point. Give it a read here ERP Report 

Dynamics Ax2012 Development Cookbook Review

Well Thanks to Mindaugas for his hot recipes with Ax2012. The books has been organised as “how to do it” sections with most of the topics being what we would typically search in the blogosphere. It is like hitting the “I am feeling lucky” button. The author has chosen to go in detail rather being broad and covering less in every topic. So you will get pretty much a deep understanding around the topics.

Who should read it ?

It is for those who have a introduction to Ax and are looking up to sharpen your application skills.

What can i cook out of it ?

The book basically has a diverse thread of chapters like lookups, forms, Ax performance and business process implementation. The book begins with about handling data through temp tables, exporting and importing them. It moves on to detail on Forms with specific focus on adding filters, creating dynamic forms. Special controls like tree and list controls are also covered with good detail. The chapter on look-up is really exhaustive and would introduce you to every possible way of having look-ups with the client application. It includes the tree look-ups, dynamic look-ups and even the color picker.

The business process section details typical journals that would be required in customization like the ledger journal, posting of sales, purchase orders. The author has also devoted a chapter to integration with office clients through the COM connector. This would typically help you in creating components that can work independent of the office snap ins. There is also a chapter on the new services framework and systems services like Query, metadata. It also includes a brief introduction to create new documents using the service framework.

The development efficiency chapter outlines how as a developer you can make your routine tasks easier with add-in tools. The good point is the examples listed here are something that you can readily use like template for the find method, setting up a start up project and so. The final chapter educates you about tuning performance in your application from a developer perspective. There are very good insights in to the trace parser and caching of display methods.

Overall: The book is simple easy and quick to read, well organized with sufficient code examples. A good reader would definitely speed up his skills with a book as such this.

Rating: 3.5/5  click here to buy it now

Thanks to PACKT Publisher for asking me to review this book.

Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2012 – Development Cookbook

Well readers here is another book to speed up your skills on top of Dynamics Ax 2012. Mindaugas Pocius has come up with a development cookbook. Please refer to the following link for more details http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-dynamics-ax-2012-development-cookbook/book  while i prepare to review this book shortly in my blog.

The book offers to provide details under the following titles

• Explore data manipulation concepts in Dynamics AX
• Build scripts to assist data migration processes
• Organize data in Dynamics AX forms
• Enhance your application by using advanced form controls
• Create custom lookups using AOT forms and dynamically generate them from the X++ code
• Create and post Dynamics AX journals from code
• Create and manage purchase and sales orders from code
• Create a custom electronic payment format and process a vendor payment using it
• Integrate your application with Microsoft Office Suite
• Create various Microsoft Office documents that can be used for exporting/importing business data for further distribution or analysis
• Integrate the system with external systems using various approaches
• Improve your development efficiency and experience
• Learn simple but effective tips on how to improve overall Dynamics AX performance

Dynamics Ax 2012 Unleashed – Pre-order now @ Amazon

Couldn’t believe my eyes gentlemen, this afternoon I was surprised to see a pre-order open for a book on Dynamics Ax 2012 in Amazon. Not much information except for the author names. The authors are from the executive team of cole systems. Click here to know more about the authors..

“Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Unleashed” by Ivan cole and David weiner – Pre order for yourself here…http://amzn.to/eVuWjX

Tools4Dax – Development tools for Dynamics Ax

There is always a gap between what the developer wants and the product offers. Though Dynamics Ax is making fast improvement in the upcoming versions in bridging thesegaps, the current version has a handful of it 🙂 .. that’s when utilities come in to help like the verticals for functional gaps.

I can remember how utilities like Tabax/Sidax from Max Belugin, Kashperuk’s Table Addon, DaxConfig by Arijit, AxAssist helped me and inspired me to come up with my own utilities…But these days I miss the trend. Uust to keep it kicking and alive is another such utility from  itwrkx.com “Tools4Dax”.

This utility offers quite a number of features I did try a few of them but yet to use it full fledged. Here is the list of features that Tools4Dax promises to offer and moreover it’s FREE!!!

1. Getting AOT node information about a field in a form.
2. Finding all unused labels.
3. Generating common table methods like find().
4. Generating default objects like forms.
5. Inserting user specified class, method and headers and comments in code.
6. Inserting commonly used statements in code.
7. Generating project trees and adding nodes.
8. Debugging Queries.

Download it here … http://bit.ly/eQk6Aw

Also interestingly they offer the first know tool for Scrum in Dynamics Ax (SCRUM4Dax). This is a nice move but what would be interesting is if this is integrated or built around Ax TFS(Like handling workitems). I haven’t still used it as we run our scrum development on Atlassian

Comparison of Dynamics Ax with different ERP Solutions in Market

Refer here for a detailed comparison of Dynamics Ax along with other ERP’s like Oracle, SAP, INFOR, IQMS, SysPro, Plex Systems and more

http://bit.ly/cgWXQk

Screen Shot Comparisons