Geek - 1

All is well in the world of smart-phones since Fring arrived not too long ago. Despite having a logo that looks like it was designed in a few seconds of fierce MS-Paint wiggling, this application is actually becoming pretty useful to me.

I've always been interested in proper typography, especially in combination with internationalisation. Anyone who has worked with me on a project that would involve either will know that I'm particularly anal when it comes to finding and using the most appropriate layout and glyphs for the job.

My favourite examples are often ‘İstanbul’, ‘naïve’, and the difference between a Pound (‘£’, with one bar) and a Lira (‘₤’, with two bars, for which Wikipedia is presently incorrect).

To this end, I once unwisely offered potential flamebait to the Unicode group regarding single and double bar dollar signs. I know that historically the double-bar form depicted strength, but became the single-bar form because of the difficulty in representation using tiny sorts. I also know that Australia prefers a double-bar, New Zealand prefers a single-bar, and the USA don't care anymore as long as they get paid at the end of the day in their own currency.

Despite this, I have been very lax in this regard when it has come to my blogging.

It's been a long time since I've done some proper web design, but now I'm working on a mysterious project (long story) that requires me to dive-in once again. Compared to many other people, my design skills are mere tinkering in comparison. At the very least, though, my tinkering isn't as bad as the average MySpace page which is more likely to lock up your computer (it is considered the worst website around by many sources).

Unfortunately life in web design land is still a world of pain and torture.

Recently I've been talking about an article Dave Winer wrote about one of his long-time favourite rants: embedded HTTP servers in devices. Once again, I'm left with the bitter feeling that there's something built into human nature that makes most of us love waste.

Not only physically where we are become an ever-increasing disposable society, throwing away perfectly good things that just need small repairs, but also digitally on the Internet where we are wasting more and more bandwidth and CPU cycles with our bloated, lazy protocols and software designs.

It's time for me to put on my Womble hat and flog the dead horse one more time.

I like Serendipity for blogging, and have no intention to move to WordPress despite constant nagging from fellow bloggers.

The great thing about Serendipity is the ease at which new plug-ins can be created. While their plugin API documentation looks like it's lacking substance, it makes sense once you get going and realise the blanks are fairly obvious.

On Monday, Mr. Brewer mentioned something about my Axapta posts looking messy and that they could probably benefit from a little thing called GeSHi. Having never heard of this before, I set out and asked the oracle what this was.

After finding this funky little toy, I set my heart on writing a tiny plug-in for Serendipity, but David Rolston beat me to it.

Our company was the first to use the European Commission's VIES system via SOAP to validate VAT numbers automatically. We used to have a custom hack to perform this operation within Axapta 3.0, waiting for what was then a rumour that Dynamics Ax 4.0 would be able to call .NET assemblies via CLR interoperability.

In my previous article, I touched on calling code within Ax from C#, but now I want to explain how this works the other way around.

I'm currently in the process of migrating our Axapta 3.0 system over to Dynamics Ax 4.0. This is a difficult process due to the number of customisations we have made in the system, and many changes between the two standard code-beds. In light of this, we've been conscious of new developments on the horizon, so some of our customisations had temporary snippets of code in them, waiting for enhancements such as .NET interoperability.

One of these temporary snippets of code is responsible for monitoring recurring batch job execution, and ultimately the use of a monitoring system completely outside of Dynamics Ax is preferable. This is where the .NET Business Connector steps in, and since a small number of licenses come with the base Dynamics Ax product, it can be a really useful development tool. Most of what's written here will also apply to the old COM Connector, in principle.

Every man and his dog have been talking about the new iPhone, launched last week by Steve Jobs during his Macworld 2007 key-note speech. No this isn't the Linksys iPhone (that now pales in comparison); this is the long anticipated revolutionary product from Apple, the next in the line since the launch of the iPod in 2001.

This news has also marked the end of Apple Computer Inc. and the start of Apple Inc., a new name for what is no longer a computer company, but a mainstream consumer electronics company. This is possibly the biggest news from Apple, above and beyond the iPhone launch, since it shows a fundamental shift in the company's focus.

I've seen the keynote speech, and read so many articles, and it seems most points of view are partisan, either loving the new device, or hating it disparagingly. I don't feel either views are warranted, so I thought I'd share my thoughts.

At the office, we recently received a Google Mini. We finally had some time to open the thing and start testing it out. After one week, we're already pretty impressed with the power and flexibility, but there are still some things missing.

It seems that calling Windows API functions from Axapta is viewed as some sort of mysterious magic by most Axapta developers. Unfortunately, there are times when you need to do something that requires tight integration with functionality that exists outside of the system. While there are other methods of interfacing between bits of code, including COM, XML-RPC, or even .NET, using the Windows API can sometimes be very efficient, and powerful.

For beginner WinAPI coders who are also Axapta programmers, with at least some programming experience in C or C++, I felt it might be better to answer a question from my colleagues about calling WinAPI calls from Axapta, outside of those already wrapped by the WinAPI:: or WinGDI:: classes.

It's been a long time since the original conception of Artemy Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard, probably the first keyboard that's ever created large waves in the geek community when it was first announced. Now, however, it appears the keyboard has gained itself a bad reputation, and will be a mere shell of its original self.

So blogging has lasted a week for me so far - I'm impressed I'm not bored of it yet!

Axapta inherently begs community involvement from X++ developers due to its horrible lack of documentation. Dynamics Ax 4.0 (the erp system formerly known as..) certainly solves this to great lengths, but there are still grey-areas here and there which need to be filled in.

I often get asked about tips and tricks in Axapta, and today I was asked (again) about the nofetch keyword in X++ select statements. Why is it there? What's the point?

Congratulations. You won, and I hate you for it, vehemently.

I've tryed to avoid you for so many years now, ignoring the constant requests from family and friends, and refuting accusations from colleagues that my life is incomplete without you, I've finally had to give in.