In the course of our engagement with numerous partners and customers, we have learned how much developers enjoy working with Microsoft Dynamics AX. We love building ever-more-powerful versions of Dynamics AX that help our customers increase their competitiveness; our partners love our product’s powerful set of development tools, which allow them to build affordable and flexible enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems whose quality and adaptability are second to none. Some of the examples in this book, such as creating and exposing custom data sets to external applications through a Web service, can be performed in 10 minutes or less. The very same examples would take at least a week to complete in other ERP systems.

This is the second edition of this book. We received very positive feedback on the first edition, Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, from people who used the book for a variety of purposes: from ramping up new teams and using the information in it to build presentations, to giving copies to customers, prospects, and colleagues. Our aspiration for this new edition is to incorporate the feedback we received on the original book and to cover the technologies added to Dynamics AX 2009, such as ASP.NET for Enterprise Portal, new Workflow functionality, Role Centers with advanced business intelligence, and the new Batch framework.

We believe that this book, which aims to provide developers with solid information on advanced concepts, can make your entry into the powerful toolset for building business applications a much smoother and more digestible learning experience. We hope that this book is received as an insightful resource for many people working with Dynamics AX 2009.

I want to thank the coauthors for using their evenings and weekends to contribute to this book.

I wish you success with your implementation and customization of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009.