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Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 EP Developer Enhancements

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Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012: Rapidly respond to business needs

To gain a competitive edge, business processes need to respond rapidly to changing market conditions by improving operational efficiencies. They should be a strategic tool for handling change and not be a hurdle to be overcome. Enterprise Portal (EP) provides full flexibility with a first class development tool like ASP.net/Visual Studio while simplifying the complexity of Web development from application developers and provides a simple metadata based modelling approach to build their user interface.

• Write Once/ Write Less for List Pages: Customers and partners want to share their development effort as much as possible between Client and EP, so that their work of enabling the application capability in both becomes simpler, easier to maintain, and ensures consistency. We took your feedback and implemented a model-driven, list-page approach that provides a holistic experience to the developers and end users. This is accomplished by basing the entire List Page on the Services infrastructure and reusing the metadata fully from the Application Object Tree (AOT). Developers define the user interface components in AOT one time and write the user interface application logic in a display agnostic way. Both Microsoft Dynamic AX 2012 Client & EP renders the list page using this common metadata and business logic, and reduces the development time and cost. This feature is only available for List Pages in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. The Task pages in EP are still being built in Visual Studio using C#.

• MorphX EP enhancements: The Microsoft Dynamics AX cross-reference system allows you to see the relationships between objects. You can see which other objects use the current object and also which other objects the current object uses. This is a great tool for rapidly responding to changing business needs. As you make changes to one particular object, you can easily find out the other impacted objects and fix them in one go. In the previous version, EP artifacts in AOT were not covered by the cross-reference system. In this release, we bridged this gap and seamlessly integrated the Web controls developed in Visual Studio and the Web pages developed in SharePoint in their respective nodes with the cross-reference system, so making changes in EP is simpler for developers. Also, the code difference tool  works with the EP artifacts in AOT.

• Visual Studio EP enhancements: The visual studio development experience for EP, Reports, and managed code development are integrated now with one set of tools to ensure consistency and familiarity. The Application Explorer in Visual Studio provides an easy way to pull content from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to Visual Studio. The projects are now saved in AOT, so that the changes are instantly reflected in AOT and EP without the needing the user to manually add it to AOT or deploy to EP during development. Consuming X++ classes in C# are made simpler through the Proxy development project in Visual studio. Proxies could be easily shared between different projects and deployed seamlessly together without any conflict.

• Development Environment: Multiple developers can use one shared Web server for development. The templates are deployed in a place where any user who has access to that machine can use it. In the previous version, manual steps were required to enable multi-user development scenario in single box.  Developers can now use Windows 7 client 64 bit to develop EP. They no longer need to install a server operating system on their development box.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2011
    Hey Mey, when can we expect some 'basic' tutorials on EP2012 :)

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2011
    Hi Good overview as allways I have been playing around with EP 2012 since january 2011 and it looks realy nice, i was very interested to see if the debugging on X++ code running on EP pages would work now and it sure does. Great improvement from version 2009 Einar Lárusson http://twitter.com/#!/EP_Lobbi www.linkedin.com/.../edit

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2013
    Hi I am trying to import excel in Enterprise portal in Ax 2012 For that i have done the following -> created a new webpage and used asp fileupload control in the page to load the excel file. -> After loading the file i have called the Ax method where i have written code to read the excel This excel import is working in some machines but in some machines i am getting the following errors when trying to import the excel ->  COM object of class Excel.Application could not be created.Ensure that object has been properly       registered   on computer ->  object 'COM'could not be created ->  Ensure that Microsoft Excel is installed Do you have any idea what might be the problem ? Note : microsoft excel is properly installed in the machine and the version is same in both the environments where the import is working properly and not working properly

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2013
    Hi Gangadhar, Can you share me that code which is working on my mail id : arun.garg87@live.com Thanks & Regards' Arun Garg