Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Development Cookbook [Formato Kindle]

Mindaugas Pocius has updated his development cookbook for AX 2009 to this "Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Development Cookbook".

The book gives you detailed recipes for solving common development tasks such as importing data to journals or creating and posting sales and purchase orders.

Each chapter contains an introduction of the tasks covered, the detailed solution and a detailed explanation of how the solutions works. Many chapters also holds a section where the solution is either tweaked a bit or expanded to do more. Accompanied with lots of screen clips you'll never feel lost while working with any of these recipies.

Chapter 1 is about processing data. It's on of the more diverse chapters. It covers tasks like creating new number sequences, adding document handling notes, building query objects, executing direct SQL, working directly with XML files, using the date effective feature and more.

I don't think executing direct SQL can be considered an everyday task. I would have preferred more about regular AX queries in stead. But the explanation itself of direct SQL is all right.

I'm very happy that there's an example on how to enhance the data consistency check. Many developers are not aware of the existence of these checks.

Chapter 2 is all about forms, or nearly all about forms. I'm missing stuff about list pages and security on forms. This chapter doesn't seem to changed much from the previous book.

The chapter covers however important areas, such as how to create dialogs, handle dialog events, build dynamic forms, add form splitters, create modal forms, store usage data, use tree controls and more.

Chapter 3 is about working with data in forms. It covers areas like using a number sequence handler, creating custom filters, building selected/available lists, preloading images, creating wizards, processing multiple records, coloring records and more. Personally I loath colored records. I prefer other indicators on the lines, such as icons. I don't agree with the author that the colored records makes the system more intuitive and user friendly.

With the new checkbox interface for selecting several records, I hope to see more solutions where users are able to work with several records at a time. And I hope that this section for the next book will be expanded to also explain the client/server issues you could get yourself into, if users selects many records and your business logic is executed on the server-tier as it should.

Chapter 4 is an entire chapter devoted to building lookups. These are automatic lookups, dynamic lookups, form based lookups, tree lookups and more. I can't really think of a lookup type that is not covered. Excellent chapter.

Chapter 5 is called "Processing business tasks" and covers a variety of AX module related business tasks. This is the only chapter you can say is really about module functionality. It covers good ground about using the new segmented entry control, creating journals of different types, creating and posting ledger vouchers, creating and posting sales and purchase orders and more. I think this chapter really hits the nail on the most common, or unavoidable, business tasks you will encounter as an AX developer.

Chapter 6 is about integration with Microsoft Office. It explains, with good examples, how you can work with Excel, Word, and Project files. And it also explains how to send e-mail using Outlook. In relation to Outlook, I would have liked to see some information about the possibilities for getting rid of the dreaded "A program is trying to send an e-mail message on your behalf...." dialog. That's the first thing a user will complain about when implementing a solution where Outlook is used to send e-mail from AX.
Also I'm missing just a little information about the new service based integration with Excel, even though it might not be directly considered a development task. At some point you will most likely be asked to debug it though.

Chapter 7 covers services; system query services, metadata services, document services, enhanced document services, custom services and external services. If you need to work with services, you can learn a lot from this chapter.

Chapter 8 is about improving development efficiency and covers stuff like creating editor templates, modifying the Personalization form, modifying the application version and more. This a chapter I'd might have replaced with something else, if I only had a certain number of pages for the book.

I'm glad however to read the stuff about modifying the application version. I have seen this done wrong, in ways that choke AX's upgrade algorithms, so many times.

Chapter 9 is about improving the performance of the product. It's an all right chapter, but I might have sacrificed the previous chapter to make more room for this chapter. It explains how to calculate code execution time, write efficient SQL statements, caching display methods, using the Dynamics AX Trace Parser and the SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor.

I would have liked to see more about reducing client/server chattiness through RPC. If you have too many calls back and forth or move to much data between server and client, it doesn't really matter much how efficient your SQL statements are.

Conclusion
You could always ask for more in a book like this, but for a book of this size the content is well prioritized. I would however suggest that Mindaugas for the next book maybe hook of with some co-writers in order add a few hundred pages more.

Some of the areas I'm missing recipes for about is:
.NET CLR Interop
Writing code in .NET with Visual Studio
Reporting
Enterprise Portal
Security
Batch
Debugging

Buy or don't buy? BUY - the book is well worth the money and you'll be using it regularly, cutting off time from your development projects.

An AX 2012 version of the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Development Cookbook has been published.

Like the previous book, this book contains a ton of easy to follow recipes on typical AX development tasks. Like any cooking book, this is not a book you read cover-to-cover. Rather it is a book you keep close at hand, so you can grab it whenever the need arises.

I'm giving this book 1 star less than then AX 2009 book, primarily because it contains a lot of the same recipes - at a glance 60-70% of the book's material is the same. Given all the new functionality in AX 2012 it should be possible to fill the book with AX 2012 recipes, and refer to the AX 2009 book for tasks that hasn't changed. If I bought a 2012 food cooking book, I'd also expect new recipes compared to last year's cook book.

The new book contains an excellent new chapter on Services, but completely ignores:
1. AX 2012 Forms - new UI guidelines, styles, templates, fact boxes, panes, parts, etc.
2. BI and Analytics - a critical (and complex) part of any development project.
3. Security - AX 2012's new security implementation - where a significant burden is moved to the developer.
4. Visual Studio development and AX.

Further; the book contains a new recipe on Application Version numbers that is plain obsolete. In AX 2012 version numbers should be handled by versioning of models - not by doing what is in this recipe.

Finally; the book deviates from its promise of being a cook book, by starting to describe how to use various tools, like Trace Parser and SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor - good info, it just doesn't belong in a cook book.

Conclusion; a book (like most other things) that leaves you wishing for more is not a bad thing. I'll keep this within reaching distance from my desktop.

This book provides information I have not found anywhere else, including not in the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 MSDN documentation or in Microsoft CustomerSource training materials.

But some other reviewers have noted a problem or two with the book's code. One "problem" I didn't see anyone mention yet is that the author's X++ queries use QueryBuildRange instead of QueryFilter. The Microsoft documentation notes that X++ queries - especially if they use an outer join - should use the newer (introduced in AX 2012) QueryFilter instead of the QueryBuildRange. Here is a quote from a book I highly recommend on AX 2012 ...

"Forms in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 apply filtering through the use of QueryFilter objects instead of QueryBuildRange objects. QueryBuildRanges are applied to the ON clause in a Transact-SQL statement, which works correctly for inner joins because the ON clause and the WHERE clause provide equivalent behavior. However, this does not work as expected for outer joins. The expected behavior for data sources with outer joins is to apply the WHERE clause to restrict the entire query, instead of the ON clause, which restricts only the join. To solve this problem, the QueryFilter class was created. All of the internal kernel logic in the forms engine that modifies queries uses QueryFilter objects. It is recommended that all new X++ logic on forms use QueryFilter objects instead of QueryBuildRange objects for consistency."
(Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, The Microsoft Dynamics AX Team, Microsoft Press, 2012, p172)

PS: So far, I don't see where the code in the book will be of much use to me, personally, once I get access to AX 2012. So I rated it down to 3 stars. Maybe once I get hands-on I will find uses for the book's code.