Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for Dynamics Ax

Application lifecycle management (ALM) can be described as an overall technique to provide and support a certain level of implementation, system and business qualities. For these qualities to reach a minimum level of satisfaction it requires a set of tools to ease the road to assur it.
Because a Dynamics Ax implementation environment has some gaps related [...]

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The future embraces EDA

Event driven architectures (EDA) will come in the following years more to the front in distributed applications and their architectures. Some think they are the next step after SOA, others have the idea that the 2 (reference) architectures complements. Eitherway, in todays distributed applications some concepts of EDA are already used, although mostly the defined/used software delivery cycles don’t [...]

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Ax Runbase patterns for RPC reduction

The Dynamics Ax performance team published patterns that can be interesting to solve performance problems in case maybe some of the following issues arise.
Issue #1:
The #CurrentList macro is used for both SysLastValue and Pack/Unpack serialization.
Issue #2:
Non-packable objects are created on the dialog which runs on the client, but used on the RunBase derivative class which [...]

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Use AIF features or AMM features for integration?

When we are in a situation in which we need to integrate an Ax module with other Ax modules, or the Dynamics Ax application with other applications some solutions arise and some considerations need to be made.
(Some comparisons are made between the AIF and the AMM but with no intention to fully clarify the differences.)
One solution is the Ax [...]

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Event Driven Architecture

Event Driven Architecture is brought into attention in the (latest) Microsoft architecture journal 17 and more specifically in the article: Using Events in Highly Distributed Architectures. David Chou points out that SOA can be nicely extended with the event principle and gives some extra general quality advantages provided in the application when using events (others are described [...]

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Linq for Dynamics Ax blog

The team who developed a Linq provider for Dynamics Ax commented today on a previous post and announced their product features and their new blog. Because I can only fully support every step forward in better quality providing techniques and tools I want to explicitly point out here their comment.
Over the next few [...]

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Advanced Ax Batch

Advanced Ax Batch is a nice batching frame for Ax 3.0 and Ax 4.0 with some very interesting design goals:
1. Remove the need for a running Dynamics Ax client. Job execution is service based with better security and the ability to run in the background.
2. Increased stability by integrating Ax with the powerful built in [...]

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Linq for Dynamics Ax

Linq is one of .Net 3.5 most interesting new feature. It is an abstraction layer in .Net that makes all kind of data accessing more uniform, and brings understandability and declarative programming more easily into your coding.
There are Linq provides for Sql, Xml, objects… and now there is a Linq provider for Dynamics Ax. They have [...]

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Microsoft Dynamics Ax Testing Guidance

Microsoft published their advice on testing in Microsoft dynamics Ax: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 White Paper: Testing Guidance
Summarized:

It is important to identify someone who is wearing the software test or software quality hat during all phases of the project.
A primary tool during the requirements, design, and coding phases is peer review.
Code review is perhaps the [...]

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“Overusing” patterns or “Misusing” patterns?

People can state that patterns can be overused. In a way this sounds strange to me.
A pattern is a model that provides a structured solution to a known recurring problem. It is a structure with a set of elements and their relations. By using a pattern in your design it provides some design characteristics which [...]

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