My new job, Dynamics AX, and X++

I started a new job (at SHI) back in January. I’ve been wanting to post something about it for awhile now, but I’ve been pretty busy. Also, I kind of wanted to keep quiet about it for a bit, just in case it didn’t work out. Well, I’ve been there for about two months now, and it seems to be going well.

Right now, I’m doing development for our Dynamics AX system, using AX’s proprietary programming language, X++. It’s a reasonably decent and relatively modern language, very similar to C# and/or Java. I do miss the more chaotic environment I’d previously been working in, where I was using a mix of ASP.NET / C#, JavaScript, and PHP / Drupal, depending on the project. SHI does have a fairly mixed environment, but there are enough programmers working here that they’re not likely to need me on anything other than X++ any time soon, so I guess I’ll have to get used to a bit less variety than I’ve had in the past.

The development environment built into AX is called MorphX. (This is also the name of a mediocre XBox 360 game, which kind of skews Google results for MorphX, but that’s OK.) Microsoft has obviously made some effort to add some nice features to MorphX since they acquired AX, but it’s not quite up to the standard set by Visual Studio. They’ve also tried to standardize some of the keyboard shortcuts between VS and MorphX, but there are still a few annoying inconsistencies there.

I recently found a project on CodePlex called Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 X++ Editor Extensions, which adds a few missing features to the X++ code editor. I tend to worry about add-ins like this slowing things down or introducing instability, but these three extensions all seem to work well. (It’s funny how you don’t really think of, for instance, brace matching as being a big deal, until you don’t have it…)

I haven’t really blogged much about programming recently, so I’d really like to get back into the habit. I have a few possible topics in mind for AX-related posts, so hopefully I can find the time to write those up soon.

jailbreak

I jailbroke my iPhone on Friday, using evasi0n. (Apparently, I am one of many!) The process was fairly simple, and there haven’t been any negative side-effects, so far. I’ve been pretty happy with my iPhone, but there have been a few, fairly minor, things that I’ve wanted to do, but that weren’t possible with normal Apple-approved apps. Now that I’m jailbroken, I can fix a few of these little items.

First, I’ve always wanted to have more useful info show up on the lock screen. I played around with both IntelliScreen and LockInfo this weekend. I’m liking LockInfo a bit more. Intelliscreen can give you access to quite a lot of info on the lock screen, but I really don’t want that much, so LockInfo seemed a better fit for me. Mostly, I just wanted weather info. I always check the weather before I leave the apartment in the morning. Now, I can do that without unlocking the phone. A minor thing, but nice.

I’ve also got f.lux installed, which is kind of nifty. And SBSettings, which is pretty useful. And BiteSMS, which is a bit of an improvement on the standard iOS SMS app.

paperwork

I just spent the last couple of hours cleaning up old financial paperwork. So, if you’re not interested in that kind of thing, move along, nothing to see here, etc, etc.

I’ve blogged before about my continuing struggle to keep up with my Merrill Lynch accounts, in terms of entering the statements into Quicken. For quite a while, I’ve resisted letting Quicken download those accounts, since there tended to be some annoying little problems with that process. So, I kept manually entering them. Well, I fell off that bandwagon at the end of 2010, and had just been letting the statements pile up since. As David Allen would say, I’d gone numb to it.

I used to just have two accounts with Merrill — a catch-all account (called a CMA), and a Roth IRA. Well, now, I have the CMA, the Roth IRA, a traditional IRA (created when I rolled over the 401(k) from NMS), and an inherited IRA (from my Mom). So, that’s really too much to keep up with. Today, I decided to “clear the decks,” as it were, and get everything set up to download into Quicken. I started by shredding a bunch of old statements, from 2008-2010, that were in my filing cabinet. Then, I sorted out the big pile of 2011-2012 statements, and put them away, organized in a reasonable fashion, in the filing cabinet. Then, I set up all the accounts to download into Quicken. The result (in Quicken) is a little messy, but it all adds up correctly, and I guess that’s all I need.

My plan from this point forward is to open each statement as I get them, review it at a high level, then file it away. Meanwhile, the activity will get downloaded into Quicken any time I’m in there, balancing my checkbook, so that will be at least once a month.

I guess the main reason for this blog post is so that I can remember what I did, and when I did it, so that I can review things later in the year, and see if this system is working out. My main goal for this year is to actually look at the statements when I get them, so I can call Merrill if something is wrong, or if I need to change anything. Now that I won’t feel burdened by the need to do data entry every time I get a statement, hopefully I can avoid the temptation to just pile them up without looking at them!

Unfinished Stories

After going for a few months without reading any comics, I decided to spend a bit of time, over the last couple of weekends, trying to put a dent into the big pile of unread books sitting on the floor of my bedroom. In particular, I decided to finally read a few “orphan” books that have been sitting in the pile for, oh, five years or so. I read the first (and only) issue of Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target last week. And I read the three comics that Grant Morrison wrote for the Worldstorm relaunch of the Wildstorm universe today.

I thought that Kevin Smith’s “The Target” got off to a good start, so I’m disappointed that it never got past that first issue. I don’t really have too much to say about it past that; I think it would have been a fun story.

The Morrison Worldstorm stuff was quite interesting, though I’m not sure if it would have really gone anywhere, long-term, or if it would have wound up being a disappointing mess. It would have been fun to see where it went, regardless, but maybe its collapse was inevitable. One interesting aspect of it is that, for an “event” that only resulted in one issue of Wildcats, and two of The Authority, there’s a good bit of writing about it available on the web. I found three pretty interesting articles, one at seqart.org, another one here, and one more here. And all three are from 2011. (The comics came out in 2006.) So there seems to be something about it that has engaged people, even five years after the books were published. I guess that’s the nature of pretty much any “grand plan” stuff cooked up by Grant Morrison.

Speaking of Grant Morrison, I’ve got a couple of other random mini-series written by him in my reading pile: Sebastian O and Vimanarama. I picked them both up at the same time, out of someone’s dollar box at a convention a while ago. And both series actually ran to completion, so it’ll be a nice change of pace to read stories that actually come to an end!

CBG, RIP

I just stumbled across this article by John Jackson Miller, talking about the end of Comics Buyer’s Guide. I had a subscription to TBG (as it was called at the time) back when I was in high school. I didn’t save those issues, as it came out every week, and was mostly ads, so there didn’t seem much point. But there was some good content in there, from people like Don & Maggie Thompson and Cat Yronwode. And some nice covers by folks like Terry Beatty.

I let my subscription lapse at some point, but I picked it up again and read CBG faithfully for quite a few years, before letting the subscription lapse again a few years back. Even though I hadn’t been reading it lately, it’s sad to see it go. I actually think I learned a lot about a number of subjects unrelated to comics from CBG, mostly from Don and Maggie’s writing. CBG was always very well-edited and well-written.

I see that Maggie is now writing for the Comic-Con blog. And other former contributors have also been blogging at various sites — John Jackson Miller has The ComiChron, Mark Evanier has News From Me, Tony Isabella has his Bloggy Thing. So I still get to read stuff from some of the best writers who appeared in CBG over the years. But I’ll miss the good old hard-copy version.

inbox zero

I always feel compelled to write a meaningless blog post every time I get my inbox to zero. So, here it is: I got my e-mail inbox at work down from about 400 messages to zero today. Everything’s been tagged and filed, or deleted.

My personal email inbox is up to 600 messages though. I cull stuff out of it periodically, but I haven’t gotten around to *really* attacking it in quite a while. Maybe that’s a project for next weekend!

constraint validation and polyfills

I really like the idea of the constraint validation stuff that’s built in to HTML5. I’ve never actually used it though, since it’s not going to work in older browsers. We tend to use the standard ASP.NET validation controls on most of our projects at work, and they’re certainly usable.

The article I linked to above has a section on a couple of options for polyfills, allowing the constraint validation to work with older browsers, though, so maybe I’ll give that a shot the next time I need to do some serious web form stuff.