I have spent a lot of time recently looking for some resources to help me to learn some more advanced techniques for developing AX 2009 SSRS reports. There is a lot of information available about making basic reports and Microsoft provides some nice walkthroughs.
What I am looking for is some more in-depth information covering more about writing business logic and methods in C#. Where can I locate some Code samples or even a solid technical book?
I trust you have found the great videos from Saveen Reddy. There are dozen of great videos explaining also into details on how you go about to make AX 2009 SSRS reports:
http://www.youtube.com/user/dynamicsaxbi
Furthermore, I would highly recommend having a look at the already created report libraries. Start off with the libraries ending with SRS (Like CustSRS and VendSRS). Just rightclick a library and choose to edit it in Visual Studio. I assume your environment is already set up for this.
Look into how some reports use queries to collect data directly and some use datamethods. By examining what is already in standard, you can learn a great deal of how to solve your own requirements.
I have one advice to you:
To develop a neat looking SSRS report, use SharedLibrary already exist project and use its styles.
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I am making a design document and I need to draw pictures using Visio. I have searched through the Internet, but there is no getting started guide or tutorial. Can somebody help? I need a tutorial which helps me to draw figures of moderate complexity.
At the surface, this looks like a fairly straightforward question, but I would argue that there are some underlying problems inherent in what you are looking for. There are a couple of ways to address this question:
First, how to use Visio.. Finding that information is fairly straightforward. The documentation via the Help menu is handy when trying to determine how to actually add elements, tie them together and define schemas based on those elements (be it an E-R diagram, UML, or some other architectural diagram). Finding the tutorials you are seeking might be difficult as Microsoft has moved Visio from a standalone product, to a part of the Visual Studio Suite, to part of the Office Suite, back to a standalone product. I would start my search on MSDN. Here are a few resources:
Visio Insight - A blog dedicated to using and modifying Visio
A portion of the Visio documentation
Second, how to you develop diagrams (and perhaps more specifically architectural diagrams). This falls outside of the realm of Visio and moves more towards fundamentals. There are a lot of books on UML and diagramming problem domains. I keep a copy of the UML Cheat Sheet handy. The same goes for E-R diagrams as well as other models.
And finally, with a question: What kind of diagrams are you trying to create? As with all tools, make sure that Visio is the right tool for the job. Would the table diagraming system in SSMS work for you? How about the class diagraming system build into Visual Studio? (and this is just assuming you are using Microsoft technologies in order to develop software). Visio is great for creating flowcharts and systems diagrams as well -- and those are much more straightforward.
As one final note, check out some of the samples that should be included. Here is a link to some (albeit older) sample for Visio that should get you started.
You can always read a book on the tool and that's my personal preference. I learned Visio 2010 by reading the book "Microsoft Press Microsoft Visio 2010 Step by Step"
I’m looking at using Expression Engine for a new site I’m developing does anyone have any experience of using EE, good or bad?
I’ve looked at some other CMS but found they are quite big and although you get everything, I like EE as it looks like you can streamline it to exactly what you want your users to use?
The main feature I need is to not be taken away from the HTML and CSS and not feel restricted on what I design or relying on plugins to achieve certain aspects of the site.
The ability to create snippets of code and include them into a main template or page is really appealing. I looked at other CMS but they seem to focus more on creating pages where I would like to make up a page from varouis custom created snippets?
I come from a asp and MS SQL background rather than a php and my SQL do you think that would cause me any problems?
I've used ExpressionEngine before and found it to be extremely easy to get your head around compared to other CMS products such as Drupal. Plus, you have a lot more freedom with your designs.
One of the best resources I found on the web, is a site called train-ee.com by Mike Boyink. This is the first tutorial I did on ExpressionEngine (when I was first learning) and he goes into great detail while keeping it extremely simple:
http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free-tutorials/category/building-a-small-business-site/
Hope this helps.
Dan
Jemes,
I have been building websites on EE for a few years now and it is hands-down the most flexible and powerful system to work with. You simply can build sites faster and customize it to fit clients needs better. As a company we were so happy with it that we build our own add-on for e-commerce (BrilliantRetail).
The community (#eecms on twitter) is fantastic and there are meetups, EECI conferences (Oct 2011), Devotee EE addons and a responsive parent company (#ellislab)constantly improving the platform.
Tony
If you have a few bucks to spend (48$), and if you are more of a visual learner, you might want to have a look at Ryan Ierlan's screencasts on Mijingo:
http://mijingo.com/products/screencasts/learning-expressionengine-2-complete-series/
I come from a asp and MS SQL background rather than a php and my SQL do you think that would >cause me any problems?
I have neither background and it didn´t caused my any problems. If you don´t want to build your own plugins you won´t need to know PHP. I can´t program PHP, but never felt the necessity to learn it.
I started with EE 0.95 backthan and never looked for any other CMS, because I could build all my sites with EE. I like the concept of haveing a comercial product that is build upon an open source foundation (code igniter) coupled with a very active and friendly community.
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I'm curious as to how many people are using Open XML (OOXML) these days (either pure or via the SDK) in closed and commercial environments. I'm fairly aware of what's going on on the 'public web' (MSDN, OpenXMLDeveloper.org, etc.), but am wondering about SO people's experience with it, both good and bad.
Are most people opting out of VBA and VSTO in favor of working directly with OOXML formats? What benefits are you getting from OOXML that you're not getting from the object model. I'd love to learn more about why you're using it or why you're not, what are you using it for, etc.
I'm just trying to get a feel from the community on OOXML as an approach toward document automation or other uses. I'm not finding community forums (this one or others) to be incredibly active with questions and users (check out the number of questions by tag of this post), so I'm wondering if I'm one of the very few who is using OOXML extensively.
Now that Microsoft Office 2007 (and especially Excel) support Open XML, I'm finding it far easier to work with than Office Automation. A few major reasons for this are:
Better performance;
No flakey IPC issues (i.e. somebody left Excel open at the Save As dialog, crash);
No dependency on Office itself, or any external components whatsoever;
Fairly easy to write Linq extensions and queries against in C#;
Can be used in server environments without any problems or risks.
Given that Office XP/2003 users can open Office 2007 files with the Compatibility Pack, I don't see any reason to continue using the old automation or "OfficeML" methods. It's a bit of a learning curve, but it's arguably the best option today - it's free, it's reliable, and best of all it's the native format used by Office 2007 today and you don't need any stupid tricks to get it to work (like attaching the XLS content-type to HTML as we did for XL2003, and having XL2007 complain about an incorrect extension).
I wouldn't say it's an outright replacement for VBA/VSTO - the thing about those is that they're usually part of a solution where the requirement is to integrate with the Office environment itself. Using OOXML would generally require you to write an entire application around it. But for simple import/export, which is probably what 90% of automation has been used for in the past, definitely, OOXML is the way to go.
Libraries like Simple OOXML can also greatly help with the learning curve.
We are using Open XML SDK for export to Excel. I have to say it is quite slow so we had to do some caching on our own (for shared strings). The library is just an object representation of the Open XML format. Sometimes it can be good thing, sometimes not. Especially when you have to know Open XML standard very well because the SDK won't handle anything for you. You have to know all the restrictions the format brings, you have to know which elements you cannot ommit in xlsx or docx, etc. It allows you to create inconsistent excel spreadsheets or word documents which is not good. Well, it's free at least :) Better than nothing.
I have used Open Xml SDK for document generation in SharePoint, PPTX generation for custom presentations (pulling from XSLX for the data) and for "building" composite documents from multiple document segments.
The format and the SDK are great. No worries on the server in ASP.NET or SharePoint scenarios, and great speed. I have not found too many scenarios where the SDK or "brute force" xml cannot accomplish a goal. One instance is password protection and DRM for documents, but these are more corner cases. I would agree with aaronaught that this is not an exclusive solution, but SharePoint, VSTO and others are tools in the tool belt for document generation solutions.
I am doing the scenario that sales performance for a country is delivered in PPT Deck using Open XML
I looked at this technology a lot, I program in VBA, but it was way way to complex for my needs. There are some great things about using it that my elearning would benefit from, like Linq and XML, but the bar for going from VBA to the underlying formats is just too high and I don't have the luxury of the kind of time and money it would take investing in learning VS.Net and Open Office XML formats.
But the one thing I think it would really help with is meta-tagging PowerPoint content for an LMS.
I've used it to parse pptx files, looking for special comments in shapes. These comments are links to other resources (uri's most often, PDF files, etc.). I then use deepzoom software to render the pptx and then render the uri's inside the shape. Fun, but slow. Use it to help with research and a "novel" way to look at posters. But this isn't LOB.
We migrated from Word Interop to Open XML very recently.
Our application is used for creating Invoices in the Word and pdf format. When Interop was used, a decent size Invoice took about 5-10 minutes to generate.
Now, using OpenXML and SSRS that time has been reduced to approximately 30 seconds.
The only problem area with Word was that some features were not backward compatible from Word 2010 to 2007 and that took some time to fix and get up and running. Like creating the Table of Contents, merging documents etc.
Other than that, I think Linq, MSDN and Eric White's Blog is enough to get you going in the right direction.
Is there anyone who has used or looked into using Jitterbit as well as BizTalk? If so, what are some pros and cons of each, and which one did you go with as your final solution?
Specifically, I'm looking for SAP integration, but any input would be appreciated.
Like Rob I have not heard about JitterBit until reading your question (thanks!), I have, however, been working with BizTalk, almost exclusively, for the past 9 years; for that reason I wasn't sure I should be responding, but as Rob did, and nobody else has, I figured it's worth a couple of cents....
From the little reading I've done it seems to me that JitterBit, apart from being an open source, which has it's pros and cons, is trying to lower the entry barrier by offering a relative simple solution with the promise of rapid development and drag-n-drop approach "with no custom code".
I'll take their promise at face value, as I know nothing about it, although I have my doubts, so let's assume developing with JitterBit is really easy, there's one thing I can clearly state - developing with BizTalk isn't.
But, and that's a bit but in my view, developing with BizTalk is somewhat difficult not because Microsoft did a bad job at it, on the contrary - developing with BizTalk is somewhat difficult because Microsoft wanted to create a tool that could realistically allow enterprises to solve their BPM and integration needs well, and, in my experience, these problems are almost never simple, so Microsoft had built a server that has many capabilities, is very strong and very flexible, at the cost of complexity.
So, while any experienced technical sales guy can give you a demo of an integration scenario that is very simple, and is developed in a few minutes using a lot of drag and drop and configuration, even in BizTalk, but is this a realistic enterprise-level solution? was it a realistic scenario that was demonstrated? from my experience the answer is almost exclusively no; the problems tend to be complex, and their require a more robust solution.
So, I guess the bottom line would be - if you're looking for a one off solution, and open source is something you guys work with - JitterBit is definitely worth looking at, seeing if it's capable of helping out and has, indeed, a short learning curve (it would be important to look at maintenance, monitoring, trouble shooting, instance management etc)
If, however, you believe, as is often the case, that your solution would grow to become a BPM/integration platform in your organisation, and you need something more robust - I would put my money on BizTalk being a better candidate.
I've done a fair bit of integration with SAP, starting with the old SAP DCOM connector. More recently I've been involved in the selection of an integration platform to serve in an Enterprise Service Bus pattern.
We did web service samples to connect to SAP on a number of platforms, including BizTalk, Mule, Netweaver, Webmethods and Tibco. Webmethods won out based on licensing and capability, though BizTalk and Netweaver both had very high marks.
Jitterbit was not part of the evaluation - in fact I had to look it up to be sure I understood your question.
If your goal is just to be able to call an RFC, the .NET SAP connector works well.
If your goal is to expose a web service to wrapper a process in SAP, then BizTalk is good, but I recommend you see if your organization already has netweaver licensed as there are many web services available directly from SAP with no coding.
My recommendation is to avoid Jitterbug and Mule for the enterprise for now - unless Open Source is actually a popular thing at your place of employment. Netweaver and BizTalk are very robust, polished products.
If you are looking for something you can ship easily, then Jitterbug may make more sense. Though generally I'd recommend you define it as a web service call, and look to your customers technology stack for the most appropriate integration technique.
More context of what you are looking to achieve will enable a more accurate answer.
Michael,
We use Jitterbit in our organization and we've been very successful with it in various projects. Our SAP projects use XI and Jitterbit has dramatically simplified the ability to integrate web service interfaces with the various protocols it supports.
In addition to an excellent price (and we now subscribe to Jitterbit for support) we realize great value out of the support service. If we have any questions during our implementations they seem to provide all the subject matter expertise included in the support cost, so we're quite self sufficient.
We still have many other integration solutions in our company including VB and Java programs; it's a mess, but we don't believe that any one platform will meet all of our different divisions' needs. We have been using open source, specifically Linux and Apache for many years now, although IBM and Microsoft are also prevalent here.
We went with Jitterbit as it supports protocols needed to integrate any modern system and with SOA / Web Services being our stated direction Jitterbit was a great fit for what we needed.
Given that Jitterbit is Open Source, I would encourage you to download it and try it out.
I will say it simply, I have been using biztalk and was one of the people that helped validate the 2006 training course. Biztalk by far one the best server applications for Business process that is available today. You do also have to factor in the price point is ridiculously low compared to what else is out there.
On an average, how much time does it take to become proficient in development using JD Edwards? Is it easy to learn? Are there any prerequisites?
I'm assuming you're interested on learning the development skills of JD Edwards, not the business processes that the system actually implements.
There are 2 versions of JDE. One runs over AS/400 plataforms, DB2 database and uses RPG (language) to implement reports and functionalities. I'm not acquainted with that version (did very few interface jobs and they were all complicated due to DB2's differences from my usual flavours of databases - Oracle or SQL Server).
The other version is EnterpriseOne (formerly OneWorld). I started developing for this version in 2000 and kept active until 2006. It's very easy to achieve the basic level of development and then you get to face the oddities and known issues from the system and how to dodge them and that's when you become experienced.
All development tools are internal to JDE. There's a table designer, a query designer (with a grid interface that resembles any visual query designer), an interactive programs designer (forms), a report designer and a business rules designer.
If you have experience with any RDA tool (like Visual Studio, for instance) and development for databases, you will be able to use this knowledge to ease the learning curve. In my case, I was a SQL programmer and I had a lot of experience with Visual Basic and Microsoft Access. I was able to use that experience by understanding the underlying concepts of the system and adapting for them. It took me about 25 hours of training with a more seasoned programmer to get me ready to at least do basic stuff on real customers. This amount of hours varies from person to person, obviously.
However, I can say that I only started to feel that I was understanding the tools and the process after 6 months of daily work on my first customer. After about 12-18 months, I was ashamed of the first applications that I wrote, so I actually went back and rewrote some on my own time... :-)
The thing about JDE is: there's very little coding/functionality on the database side (because it used to be flexible on databases choices). All the forms and reports are written inside the actual system by way of the designers.
All "coding" is done by way of a simple (and sometimes dumb) point-and-click interface. For instance: you don't write an assignment statement, like var = value. You select the Assignment button, then you select the variable in a list, then you select the value in a list (or enter the value, if it's fixed).
All the rules behind forms, reports and business rules are created that way. One exception: when you're writing a business rule, you can opt between using this approach (called Named Event Rule - NER) or using the C language (called Business Function).
If you choose NER, after you finish, the system actually converts that to C.
There are debug functionalities for forms, reports and business rules.
This is basic development. There are other tools and functionalities that are usually assigned to developers and so you will be able to do a lot more. I've worked a lot with interfaces, interoperability, workflow and more.
Also noteworthy is that JDE has an internal tool for managing objects, version control, checkins, checkouts and transfering objects from one environment to another to complete the development cicle.
As a developer, the more you learn about the business processes being implemented, the better. You get to learn the inside (code, specs) and outside (process) for the functionalities and this helps you as a developer and helps you in your career (and paygrade).
Now, my only caveat regarding my answer: as I've mentioned, it's been a while since I left JD Edwards development. As far as I know, things are pretty much the same, but I can't say for sure.
Best advice I can offer: go to www.jdelist.com for specific questions and help with issues. Be polite, try to ask questions about specific matters instead of general questions (I mean: if you ask those guys how long does it take to learn JDE, they will probably ignore you, but if you ask stuff like "in your opinion, what are the most complex tasks for a JDE developer to master?" you will probably get some pretty good answers).
Hope it helps and wish you good luck with JDE. After the initial bump, I enjoyed my ride on it quite a lot.
You can start with the JD Edwards EntepriseOne Developer guide to learn about object management work bench, design tools for table, form and reports and API for Business Functions.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53430_01/nav/development.htm
As far as I can tell, it depends on the version of JDE. There are a lot of different components, and different versions (from what I can tell.) For example, a sister company of ours is running JDE over terminals to an AS/400. It's all "Green Screen" text-based screens, typing three letter commands at a command prompt, and using the cursor to move around the screen.
I haven't tried to learn it in depth yet, but trying to learn enough to do basic support has taken me several months at a few hours a week. Think of JDE as a baby version of SAP, that gives you an idea of the scope of your question.
I taught some classes about JDEdwards EnterpriseOne Development.
One of my students who never programmed before took about 320 hours of trainning to be able to do some developments on JDEdwards. Nowadays he's a coworker and a good programmer.
His 320 hours of trainning was:
During 5 months I taught on saturdays, 8 hours
Then he got another trainning which was 4 hours week and 8 hours on saturdays for 5 weeks
As I've said after all this, he has being able to perform all tasks of a JDEdwards Developer.
And my advice to who is going to study this is to have a good knowledge of SQL and have programmed before in any compiled language, it helps a lot.