X++

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.