Getting Ready for Development with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 – Part One: The Vision

As I sat down to write about all the great things a customer or partner can look forward to regarding development for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, I quickly realized that I can best describe the changes along four dimensions: vision, training, approach, and execution.

I have already started covering, in more technical detail, some of the new aspects of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 at my blog. What I want to achieve, however, with this series of articles is not specific technical deep dives, but a look at the benefits and opportunities that everyone, not just the developers, should understand about the upcoming release.

To help capture the essence of “The Vision”, this article will examine the current state of development within Dynamics AX and how we got here. From there, we can see a vision actually taking shape and taking us toward Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and beyond.

At a high level, understand that the changes in Dynamics AX 2012 are focused on the mantra “model more and code less”.  This release will give customers and partners the ability to make use of .NET skill sets to achieve customizations, ISV product offerings, integrations and more. It will allow a more pure interoperability with the rest of the Microsoft stack – interoperability that is stable and has less setup to enable.  

And as I’ll explain, I see Dynamics AX 2012 as just the beginning, opening up a world of possibilities, but also doing a good job not to close too many doors even as it opens new ones.

Managed Code: Dynamics AX 2009 Sets the Stage

...