Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 CU7 timesaver for developers

During the upgrade of my demo image from CU6 to CU7 I was tipped by a colleague to use AxBuild.exe for the application compile instead of the step in the Software update checklist. Where the checklist option usually takes a loooong time (> 1 hour) to complete, the AxBuild.exe took only 17 minutes to complete.

So what did I do? I followed all the installation steps in the Installation document until step 5. Since at this point of the upgrade all the binaries are in place you can now start using AxBuild.exe. You can find it in the servers bin directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\60\Server\MicrosoftDynamicsAX\bin on my system) One of the parameters is the number of Workers to use, this allows the compiler to use all the cores available in your system instead of 1 the traditional compile uses. But if I understand the documentation correctly AxBuild.exe is even capable itself to decide the number of workers based on the configuration it runs on. So potentially no need to specify them.

AxBuild.exe can accomplish a full compile of all X++ code, into AX p-code, many times faster than the traditional compile that you start from the MorphX client menu. AxBuild.exe is run on the Application Object Server (AOS) tier at a cmd.exe command prompt. This topic explains what AxBuild.exe does and how to use it.

To achieve the 17 minute compile I used 4 worker processes (/w=4) on my Lenovo W530 Hyper-V image. The virtual machine is configured with 8 cores and 26GB memory. CPU utilization in the VM was max 66%. This is the command I used:

axbuild xppcompileall /s=01 /w=4 /v /altbin="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX\6.2\Client\Bin"

Total duration was 00:17:31.2629116. That is what I call a timesaver!

Enjoy