There are many reasons why we bloggers blog, depending on the type of posts you post of course. Some rant about their personal relationsships, some about political stuff, and yet some about their work and / or hobbies. I fall into the last category - my posts are for myself ( so I don't forget stuff ) and for other AX people, much in the same way as Willy. When I started on AX development I knew only very little about programming in practice and very much about theory ( having a MA in Information Technology ). During my studies I buddied up with Tino at the VISL-project where I did the user-oriented studies and he did the programming ( his programming skills are still out of this world ).
So when it got round to AX development, I was scared s**tless over the lack of how-to's, documentation and manuals for AX. Much of know-how seemed to be anchored in the people who somehow were in contact with the Damgaard company or former Damgaard employees and the most common respons to programming problems was "see if you can find similar functionality in the std. application, and steal with pride". However, many of the problems were not represented in the std. application though of such a general nature, that someone out there must have a solution or hint to how to solve it. And this is where blogs and forums enter the scene. There are a plethora of blogs and forum posts out there which deal with, suggest solutions to an almost ever increasing pool of good questions ( imo - there are no stupid questions ).
Two of the sites which helped me - and continue to do so - are Axaptapedia and the Axapta Programming site and to a lesser extend MSDN, and this blog is my way of repaying the AX community in the same way I was helped in my hours of need for specific problems, and general discussions on AX related stuff.
Then I read the Microsoft Dynamics AX SDK Updates Blog and as of Nov. 10th Community content ( or wiki content ) can be added to articles ( currently only SDK 2009 - but 4.0 is in the making ). Great days are ahead of us - more books on X++ development are published now than when I started, the most recent ( 'Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Programming : Getting started' by Erlen Dalen ) appears to be an up-to-date of Steen Andreasen's MorphX IT ( which I still recommend to new AX developers ), but adding the possibilty of contributing to MSDN will increase it's overall value to AX developers out there. Kudos to the MS AX2009 SDK team which do a great job adding value to the documentation which was sparse to say the least until an increased effort from MS came about some years ago.
Happy hacking,
Steffen
