FarManager 1.80 will be Open Source

Far Manager1.80 will be Open Source.

FarManager is my favorite Norton Commander-like file manager.

The real power of this piece of software is in plugins. For example, a friend of mine had implemented a nice IDE for BAAN ERP based on FAR. And I also have some experience in this field.

Maybe, it looks weird for people, who do not remember DOS and NC, but is really powerful

MS CRM in dotnetrocks

It is announced that the next tuesday a new dotnetrocks podcast show on MS CRM will be available:

10/30/2007
David Yack Talks Microsoft CRM!

AFAIR it is the first DotNetRocks show related to Dynamics

new version of the DEV_CreateStandardsMethods extendion

The extension now can add suffix to created methods and is fully translated to english. For example parameters from the screenshot will lead to creation of findByGUID and existByGUID methods. See axaptapedia article for download and details.

Tabax is translated to Portuguese (BR)

Thank you, Ricardo

download language file

WF vs WWF

from here

Dianne Siebold's blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/dsiebold

Just found a new blog via Google alerts. Posts are dedicated to AIF and developer's documentation

Print editor hotkeys

Just uploaded a printable version of editor hotkeys. I like lookup facilities of the code editor (F2 for tables and fields), but somtimes forget key combinations. Now I have printed it and sticked it to have it in front of my eyes.

Maybe it can be useful for you also...

Tabax is one year old

About one year ago the first version of tabax was released to public

Great Thanx to all people who took part in Tabax development: AndyD, Ivan, OIP and others.

And for i18n: Manel, Helmut, Romain Gasnier

BTW, Google Alerts gave me some Brazilian blog in Portugues and the only thing, that I can read there was Tabax :)

Below there are two screenshots:

A sidax predecessor, which was developed sombody from axforum




First internal version of sidax (which is two year old now).

Video: howto drag and drop nodes from XPO to application

watch it here

Tabax 0.3.2

download
Changes:

• AxPath: use of primary key of the record instead of recID
  
• French localization (thanx to Romain Gasnier)
  
• If tabax can not find it's resources on disk it tries to download them from Ax resources (useful for Ax 4 installations)

Unwanted fields fetching when selecting by unique index

UPD: Sorry, EmplTable is not good example - because of cache enabled. But this behavoiur is tested with a specially created table with CacheLookup==None.

Last friday i was optimizing a form with a lof of display fields with an implementation like the following:

display EmplName emplName()
{
 return EmplTable::find(this.EmplID).Name;
}

The one of sources to increase performance of such code is to select only fields which will be used lately. So I have replaced this code with the following:

display EmplName emplName()
{
 return this.EmplID ?
        (select Name from EmplTable
             where EmplTable.emplID==this.EmplID).Name
        :
        "";
}

but when I enabled SQL tracing, I found, that this code producess select with ALL fields of EmplTable.
It was strange... With a great help of my co worker, i've found the following:

• when there is only fields of any unique index in the where condition, all fields are fetched
  
• when there is an extra field in the condition, only required fields is selected (and the extra fields in where)
• So I converted previously mentioned methods to the following:
  

display EmplName emplName()
{
 return this.EmplID ?
        (select Name from EmplTable
             where EmplTable.emplID==this.EmplID
                     &&
                     EmplTable.recID
          ).Name
        :
        "";
}

TabaxLite

TabaxLite is a stripped down version of Tabax for end users.
It is focused solely on the window management and does not require any external component

Hosting the Windows Workflow Foundation designer

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is the new MS technology. It comes with .NET framework 3.0.

It is interesting that workflow designer can be hosted by any app (here is an example).

And maybe someone can make an ActiveX which can be hosted by Axapta form (here is an example of ActiveX control implemented in C#)

Sending attachments using the "mailto:" protocol

It works with Outlook at least. I think this example job is enough

static void Test_MailTo(Args _args)
{
   str recepient='mbelugin@gmail.com';
   str subject = 'Test';
   str attachment = @'c:\AUTOEXEC.BAT';
   str url = strFmt(
       'mailto:%1?Subject=%2&attachments=""%3""',

       recepient,
       subject,
       attachment
   );
;
   WinApi::shellExecute(url);
}

My first attempt to make a screencast

This screencast is showing TabaxLite in action.

setPrefix

The first line which I always write at the start of the 'run' method in a RunBase descenant is:

setPrefix(this.caption());

Settings prefixes is very useful for detect causes of errors later.

There are also very useful macros: PrefixField, PreFixFieldValue

For example, this code will set prefix to the: ": _item.itemID"

void processInventTable(InventTable _item)
{
;
    setPrefix(#prefixField(_item, itemID));
    ...

BTW, I think it will be also great to have a good logging system in Ax, infolog is not enough

Tabax v 0.3

download (87k)

After the long period of beta stage, the new release of Tabax is out.


This release introduces several new features which will be very useful for developers and end-users

First of all, it works under version 4 of Dynamics Ax.

Second, it introduces the Tabax Plugin API which allows developers to increase functionality of Tabax sufficiently.

There is a plugin for Tabax (in the tabax archive) to integrate AxPath with your system: so, if you install this plugin, you can click on AxPath links in browsers and email clients and go to specific location in code or specific record in the database (thank to AndyD for this functionality).

Ivan Kashperuk has developed a great plugin named RecentWindows which I use heavily. If you close some window, it allows to reopen it quickly.

Also, Ivan added a very useful feature to Tabax: if You press the 'Edit current field' toolbar button, while holding Ctrl and Shift down, Tabax will open a table field or data method related to the currently selected form field.

I have added similar fuctionality to the 'cross referebces' buton - now You can press it while working with form, and you will see cross refereces for the fireld related to the active control.

There are also some minor bugfixes and enhancements in this release

AxPath is supported by axaptapedia

So you can create links to AOT items in Axaptapedia using regular link syntax and if you have Tabax 0.3 rc 1 installed, you can navigate them.

Thanks to Andrew Jones!

• about AxPath


• download Tabax RC1

DLR & X++

About a week ago Microsoft has announced the new technology named DLR. As far as I know, this is a layer for dynamic languages support on top of .NET framework. I watched the very interesting video where integration of Python, Ruby and JScript is shown.

But what can it give to Dynamics Ax?

I think X++ have some features of dynamic languages.

For example, method identification is being done via method names, not some kinds of method ids (i.e. virtual methiod table indexes like C++). If you write code like

MyClass x;
;
x.myMethod();

compiler checks that class MyClass have method myMethod, runtime checks, that object x has method myMethod, but run time does not check whether x is instance of MyClass.

So you can write something like

MyOtherClass y=...;
Object o=y;
MyClass x=o;
;
x.myMethod();

the code will be executed successfully if MyOtherClass have method myMethod, even if MyOtherClass and MyClass have no common superclass.

Such tricks are used with forms (for example ; Tabax plugin SDK is using it also to provide compiler checks for tabax service methods usage).

So if Microsoft is planning to move Dynamics Ax to .NET platform, they should provide support for such behaviour for the backward comapatibility.

I think the work being done on DLR can be used in such case. Jim Hugunin, architect of DLR and and the author of IronPython says (see video mentioned above), that this implementation of the Python language outperform original C implementation (CPython) and runs 2 times faster on standard benchmarks. He also pays extremely high attention on backwards compatibility (for example, you can not use .NET object methods in IronPython code until you place "import clr" statement in your code).

I think when this job will be done and authors of DLR will find and mitigate dynamic languages problems in DLR and SilverLight, the result of the job can be used in the future dynamics products.

PS. I played some time with IronPython and found though it have pretty good perormance in requires a lot of time to initialize an engine and load a script.

Tabax 0.3 rc 1:

download (80K)

changes:

• fixes bugs in AxPath


• AxPath browser integration plugins is in archive in the extras folder


• Plugin SDK documented