First lesson on Microsoft Dynamics AX finished...

Slides and materials are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/SartorBG

I just finished a teaching lessons on Microsoft Dynamics AX as a part of my engineering final year project which included:

+General Introduction to ERP systems
+Introduction to MS Dynamics AX
-Interface navigation
-Adding, deleting and editing records
-Data integrity
-Case study - students were separated in groups of 4-5 people as they presented different virtual engineering companies. They had a task to add to the system new item (valve), including its components, then connected them into a BOM (bills of materials), and finally to present the whole multi-level bills of materials in the Designer view.

The valve info they used was taken from another project they prepared a month ago during different course.

In the upcoming month of April I will be preparing and teaching other lessons on sales, MRP, purchase flows, routing, workcenters.

In the meantime, I've already finished the back-end analysis of the system and we are in a process of reviewing possible solutions for upgrading to a later version - including hardware, business logic, etc.

MS SQL 2008 instance not found in SQL Server Management Studio

A few months back I had to work on a project where we used SQL Express 2008. So I used the standard web installation package from Microsoft, found at http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/download/ . I've installed the needed tools including SQL Server Management Studio. However, once I ran it, and clicked on the 'browse' button, the list of servers was empty! I did not have such problems with SQL Server EXPRESS 2005 instances - I was able to browse 2005 edition instances with SQL Server Management Studio from the installation package of 2008 edition.















As you can see, the SQLEXPRESS instance is running on the local PC:








The solution was simple, I had to write just .\{InstanceName} in the 'Server Name' drop-down list, as shown on the image below, where {InstanceName} is the name of the local instance of the server, while '.\' is a relative path.

I hope this helps a few headbangs in the wall. :)