Project creation tool for extended classes – Dynamics Ax 2012

Productivity Enhancement tool – Ax 2012

Though cross reference is the best tool to find out references and usage details there are times when we want to search for a certain keyword to identify an example.  With the number AOT components increasing the search process is also painfully long so if we can narrow down the search then there is nothing better like that.

Recently i have been working on the SysOperationFramework and SSRS reports. I frequently used the type hierarchy browser to  find the classes that extend a base class say the UI builder in an effort to look for class that implements a certain method or usage examples of certain kind of control like the reference control. The bad part of type hierarchy browser is that you can’t search over it. So here is a simple tool that i built for myself to help through this.

This tool when initiated will prompt for a base class through a dialog, post clicking ‘ok’ it will add all the classes to the project node. This helps to narrow down the search.  Watch the video to understand and click here to download.

The other problem with type hierarchy browser was that i always wanted to open the classes shown in the tree node through a double click but i don’t know for some reason this was not done. I always had to right click and select edit. This project also additionally contains the minor change that will allow you to open the classes just by a double click. Watch the video to understand and click here to download.

Keep watching this space there is more to come in the next release
1. Create project by attributes – Find all the class that has a certain attribute and create a project
2. Create project from Type Hierarchy browser – The tool will be integrated to the type hierarchy browser
3. Create project by Interface – create a project of all classes that implements a interface

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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