We have created about 30 database ERDs (entity relationship diagrams) for tables of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2. The ERDs are useful to AX developers when they need to customize a given application module (such as Accounts payable or General ledger...

1. Understanding the Difference There has been some confusion about the behavior of X++ arrays in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, because the behavior can differ from AX 2009. Let’s clear up the confusion. In X++, you can assign an array of...

SUMMARY: You cannot pass the value of -1 for the ‘decimals’ parameter to the num2str X++ function when the function is run in .NET CIL mode, in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Introduction In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, some of...

Garbage Collection in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 This blog entry investigates issues concerning the deterministic garbage collection strategy that is employed in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. The AX garbage collector (GC) is compared to the Microsoft...

At a Dynamics AX conference in summer 2011, I was asked for guidance on when to use C# compiled to .NET Framework CIL, instead of traditional interpreted X++ compiled to p-code, in my Dynamics AX application. I will describe some deciding factors for...

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, we made compiler changes to make the X++ language more reliable and to prevent problems that may cause runtime errors. 1. Super() cannot Call an Abstract Method Suppose an abstract method is implemented by a derived...

In X++ you can optionally declare a string to have a specified maximum length: str 5 maxLen5String; Semantically, if you try to store more than 5 characters to this string, it will be truncated. In March 2010 we blogged here about the...

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 we have interoperability features that enable your .NET Framework C# code to call methods on AX classes and tables. We call this feature .NET interop to X++ . In AX 2012 we also added the ability to run X++ code as .NET...

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 we introduced the ability to compile X++ code into .NET Framework CIL. CIL can run faster than interpreted X++ for computationally intensive applications, and for applications which create large numbers of objects that must...

In this post I want to cover some of the core functional aspects of the new delegates feature introduced in AX 2012. X++ delegates expose the publisher -subscriber pattern where a delegate defines a clear contract in a publisher class. This contract is...

I was looking at the API that we publish for the X++ compiler, and it struck me that it would be really easy to implement a script host for X++. This is a program that allows you to execute arbitrary X++ code that is stored in files in the file system...

There are situations where it is useful to workl with characters in X++. As you know, X++ does not have the concept of characters in the defined in the language: Only strings are defined. However, it is not impossible to work with characters in X++, if...

The launch of the next release of Microsoft Dynamics AX will be next year. There will be a Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference 2011 in January to give partners and customers an early look at the product. This will be an important event for...

Previously the X++ language allowed the LEFT and RIGHT keywords on definitions of string variables. That is no longer valid X++. However, we still allow specifying an explicit string length. The X++ language runtime implicitly does string truncation on...

There are several legacy X++ language functions found in Dynamics AX that we have been considering for removal. All of the following APIs are no longer used internally, and some are relics from an earlier era (pre-Unicode). Given the lack of use, we do...

This issue recently came up: How do you traverse the elements in an instance of an IEnumerable<T> from X++? The answer is not as simple as it should be. The problem is that the X++ language does not currently support generics as a firstclass...

As you may know, the Ax debugger does not feature conditional breakpoints. It does obviously allow you to set breakpoints, but there is no option to make them active depending on some condition that is evaluated each time the breakpoint is encountered...

The channel 9 video: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Peter-Villadsen-and-Gustavo-Plancarte-Inside-Ax-Translator-X-to-MSIL/ showcases some work that the X++ team has done to investigate the options for transforming X++ code into managed code...

The name "Axapta Foundation Classes" or just AFC for short, is given to a number of classes that are used to contain other values. Each one specifies the type of the constituent element. The foundation classes have many things going for them: They are...

High level programming languages and their compilers solve many problems for developers who want to provide value to a particular business domain. For one thing, compilers raise the abstraction level from the nitty-gritty details of the hardware...

This post applies to Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 (see version note below). A. Enable Global Breakpoints When debugging in the client, you want to set breakpoints that can be caught by the debugger. The following steps show how. 1. Launch...

The Axapta foundation classes are a set of generally applicable classes that contain values of either simple types or other classes. They are: Structs, structures of named fields, Arrays, arrays of any type, not just simole type Lists, lists...

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, the X++ compiler is sometimes too flexible in its rules for code. It is likely at some of these flexibilities will be eliminated in future releases. This blog entry describes some flexibilities of the X++ compiler that...

In Ax 2009 the new cross company feature was introduced. It allows the programmer to specify a container containing strings denoting company names to the crosscompany hint: container c = ['dat', 'dmo']; select crosscompany: c * from custtable where...

The EP team has just created a blog about their stuff. These guys know their stuff, and are heavy users of managed code interoperability with X++. Check it out at http://blogs.msdn.com/epblog/ .