Microsoft Dynamics AX updates covered Microsoft’s guidance on what it will take to upgrade and stressed the importance of AX 2012 R3 CU8 to prepare for AX ‘7’. to AX 7. There is going to be tooling provided, but it appears that the best path will be to get upgraded to AX 2012 R3 CU8 or higher first.

Microsoft shared several looks at early builds of AX ‘7’

The Cloud is the Future is the repeating message. The cloud is a three-prong cluster consisting of Azure, Office 365, and Microsoft Dynamics. Collaboration will be much easier with new social media changes; for example, CRM will seamlessly link to Lync, OneNote, and Yammer.
Several good reasons to move to Azure – lifecycle services, disaster recovery, excellent use of proof of concept. A stunning statistic is that more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure, and the customer base is increasing weekly

They discussed the different hardware available for Azure environments:
A series, which is “not really a factor anymore”,
D series, which uses SSD’s and has faster CPUs, and prices from USD$236-$980/mo,
G Series, which can go as high as 32 cores and 448 RAM, for a range of USD$454-6532, which would be good for production environments.

Your options for deploying in Windows Azure are Lifecycle Services, manual setup, and build your own.

You can customize with Hybrid Networks. A gotcha is that when you specify the accounts, they do not validate these at the time – a bad account means you will get a failure further down the road. Finally, they addressed performance issues, and optimizations that you can do.

“Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform” and they have opened 19 Azure datacenter regions.

A very impressive demo showed a web store, and how it can use machine learning to increase sales and increase customer satisfaction.

The new dashboard was a hit.

The entertaining and informed Peter Villadsen gave examples of “how to leverage .NET from within the Microsoft Dynamics AX development space.”

He discussed:
– the common language runtime (CLR),
– calls to .NET using reflection,
– managed controls to achieve a richer user interface experience,
– the business connector (note that in AX6 (AX 2012) it was completely rewritten, and now has a user interface. )

He explained the benefits of offering business logic. with the basic business connector:
1) The BC should be used only for cases where business logic must be implemented in C#
2) Consider using services instead for all non-business logic related scenarios. T

He discussed using services and use the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and showed how to solve it in X++ and P-Code, demonstrating the differences in performance.

As a finale, he attached the Spark Core (a USD$19 Wi-Fi enabled chip) to a phone to measure the temperature and report it in AX.

Microsoft Dynamics AX development tools on Visual Studio 2013 include changes in the Visual Studio environment, Microsoft only tested their VS changes with R3, not with R2. There was definitely the implication throughout the conference that if you are on R2 or RTM you are going to need to upgrade to R3 CU8.

No new training is required – the “Microsoft Dynamics AX development experience does not change after you upgrade.” The tools require Visual Studio Professional 2013, or a better version, such as Ultimate.

Side-by-side installations of the 2010 development tools and 2013 are not supported.

“Microsoft will end mainstream support for Visual Studio 2010 on July 15th, 2015.”