AX 2009 feature: cross company support

Today I found an exciting new feature in Dynamics AX 2009: cross company support in forms, reports, queries and X++.
Yes, and it really is what you think: you can display records from different companies in a single form (or report). Yeah !

For a form, you just have to set the property AllowCrossCompany to Yes in the form's query and add a field that displays the company's ID to the forms's grid. That's it. Easy as that!

In X++, there is a new keyword crossCompany you can use in a select statement. Additionally, you can add a container with all the company ID's you want to include in your select statement.
So, your select statement could look like that:

while select salestable crossCompany : [dmo, cos]
{
... do something ...
}

Now, that's really a huge step forward from the good old changeCompany function.

New book: Quality assurance for Dynamics AX-Based ERP Solutions

The last days I could read a new book about Dynamics AX: Quality assurance for Dynamics AX-Based ERP Solutions

The target audience is project managers, AX developers, AX consultants, AX customers and all others who are interested in managing quality in Dynamics AX projects.

The book is divided into 9 chapters:
the first two chapters will introduce Dynamics AX as an ERP system and how it helps you to maintain quality in your customizations.
Chapter 3, "Best practices - Technical" gives you hints on how to use several AX customization standards.
Chapter 4, "Best practices - GUI" contains detailed checklists that you should follow designing your user interface.
Chapters 5 to 8 are giving an overview about how testing should be performed.
The last chapter contains an overview about the Dynamics AX tools you can use to guarantee quality in Dynamics AX.

How did I like the book? Well, there are some things in the book that can be useful, like the checklists for the user interface and the overview of the checks the built-in best-practice tool performs.
But there are 2-3 chapters in the book I could easily live without.

On an overall rating, I would give the book 6 out of 10 points.

If you want to order a copy, you can get it from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Assurance-Dynamics-AX-Based-Solutions/dp/1847192912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208193317&sr=8-1

The book was published by Packt Publishing: http://www.packtpub.com/

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009

You can download a couple of Docs and Powerpoint files about what's new in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 from Partnersource: https://mbs.microsoft.com/...

Take a look to find out all the exciting new features!

eBook "Inside Dynamics AX 4.0" available for download

The great book "Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0" is available as a free download now.
You can go to: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/5/8/258C8894-B94A-4A87-81EA-4DBB9776F8F2/622579eBook.pdf to download your copy.

Attention: You may not print the PDF document.