Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Microsoft Dynamics AX

Microsoft Dynamics AX is one of Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning software products.

History

Microsoft Dynamics AX was originally developed as a collaboration between IBM and Damgaard as IBM Axapta. IBM returned all rights in the product to Damgaard shortly after the release of Version 1.5. before Damgaard was merged with Navision Software A/S in 2000. The combined company, initially NavisionDamgaard, later Navision A/S, was then ultimately acquired by the Microsoft Corporation in the summer of 2002.[3] Before the merger, Axapta was initially released in March, 1998 in the Danish and U.S. markets. Today, it is available and supported in forty-five languages in most of the world.

Custom AX development and modification is done with its own IDE, MorphX, and resides in the same client application that a normal day-to-day user would access, thus allowing development to take place on any instance of the client. The development language used in Axapta is X++.

On May 26, 2008, Microsoft completed developing the latest version (2009) in facilities spanning the globe and including sites in Vedbæk, Denmark; Kiev, Ukraine; Fargo, North Dakota, United States; and Redmond, Washington, United States.

Architecture

The Microsoft Dynamics AX software is composed of four major components:

The Database Server, a database that stores the Microsoft Dynamics AX data
The File Server, a folder containing the Microsoft Dynamics AX application files
The Application Object Server(s) (AOS), a service that controls all aspects of Microsoft Dynamics AX's operation
The Client(s), the actual user interface into Microsoft Dynamics AX

 
MorphX and X++

MorphX is an integrated development environment in Microsoft Dynamics AX that allows developers to graphically design data types, base enumerations, tables, queries, forms, menus and reports. MorphX supports drag-and-drop and is very intuitive. It also allows access to any application classes that are available in the application, by launching the X++ code editor.

Because MorphX uses referencing to link objects together, changes in, for example, datatypes of fieldnames will automatically be reflected in all places where they are used (such as forms or reports). Furthermore, changes made through MorphX will be reflected in the application immediately after compilation.

Microsoft Dynamics AX also offers support for version control systems (VCS) integrated with the IDE, allowing collaboration in development. There is also a tool for reverse-engineering table structures and class structures to Visio. The actual implementation limits the practical use of both these features.

X++ itself is the programming language behind MorphX, and belongs to the curly brackets and .-operator class of programming languages (like C# or Java). It is an object-oriented class-based single dispatch language. X++ is a derivative of C++ (both lack the finally keyword for example) to which garbage collection and language integrated SQL queries were added.