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 weeks we will be launching a blog where we hope to demonstrate some of the cool features of the product, as you point out it makes integration with Ax super easy.

Some features of the provider; Follows the Linq to SQL model, exposure of the Dynamics dictionary via .Net objects, VS ‘AxMetal’ Addin for generating the data contexts, Create, Update and Delete support for single and multiple row instances, full support of Ax transactions and of course retrieving data via the Linq syntax.

If anyone has any questions about the provider then please feel free to contact me.

Jonathan

If you want to download a trial version you can find it here. In my current project at AWW the use of the product is on the table for (future) evaluation.

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 windows scheduling service (Scheduled tasks). The integration is based on Windows communication foundation (WCF).
3. Deep integration with the event log. This gives the ability to monitor the scheduling system with event log monitoring systems.
4. Performance counters ads the ability to monitor the health of the system.
5. Manageability. Configuration and setup is Ax based with seamless integration of external services.
6. Job sequences. Execute a batch group or class depending on the result of a previous steps.
7. Highly extensible event system adds event monitoring to the job scheduling system.
8. Reduced cost by using Com users instead of regular Ax users.
9. Advanced notification through email when a job succeedes, fails or times out with detailed information from the infolog and eventlog included in the mail.

There is also a demo.

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 a nice demo that shows how easy it is and how beautifull it fits inside other .Net code. This compared with the standard way of using only the business connector framework to read data from a Dynamics Ax table.