New Developer Courses in Microsoft Dynamics Learning Portal

Microsoft Dynamics Learning Portal is a great resource to get started and acquire knowledge on the new Dynamics AX.You will need a partner account or PartnerSource Login to ign into the portal. Some new courses added recently in last few weeks in Dynamics Learning Portal and maybe some interest to developer community:

80925AE: Advanced Database Manipulation in Microsoft Dynamics 

80938AE: Use and Design of Product Inventory Management for Development in Microsoft Dynamics AX

80939AE: Use and Design of the Inventory Management Module for Development in Microsoft Dynamics AX

80928AE: Number Sequence Development in Microsoft Dynamics AX

Dynamics AX 2012 and SQL 2016 Support

Greetings Friends!

A quick post!

Microsoft has recently announced the support for AX 2012 with SQL Server 2016. This is exciting news as we have more possibilities integrating Dynamics AX 2012 with Power BI and Entity Store

Announcing support for Office 2016 and SQL Server 2016 with AX 2012 R3 and R2

Troubleshooting Illegal data conversion from original field synchronization Errors Dynamics AX 2012

Hi All,

Recently, I encountered this synchronization error in AX 2012

Error:

I got this error on opening Customer form after I did a update of my local AX with a copy from UAT AX.

Error:

Illegal data conversion from original field CustTable.ServiceRegionsDN to CustTable.ServiceOrderDN: unable to convert data types to anything but character field type (14 to 49)

Note: ServiceRegionsDN and ServiceOrderDN are custom VAR fields.

Solution:

Note - Please be careful while doing any SQL update from database. I did this in my local sandbox, Not recommended to do it in Production AX.

Check the field id in AOT and compare it with SQLDictionary table in SQL with the following query

select * from sqldictionary where TABLEID in (select TABLEID from sqldictionary where name = 'CustTable')
and name = 'ServiceRegionsDN '

Update SQLDictoniary table with the correct fieldid
update SQLDICTIONARY set fieldid = 60080 where TABLEID in 
(select TABLEID from sqldictionary where name = 'CustTable'
)
and name = 'ServiceRegionsDN '

Reference - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/axsupport/2012/09/19/troubleshooting-aot-synchronization-errors/

Dynamics AX 7 Update 1 Released

Dear All,

Just letting you know Microsoft has released Update 1 for AX 7. You can read more about this release and What's New Over here - https://ax.help.dynamics.com/en/wiki/whats-new-or-changed-in-dynamics-ax-7/

The steps for deploying this update from LCS onto your environments are listed in the release notes over here - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/lcs/2016/05/27/may-2016-release-notes/

How to Troubleshoot AOS Crash using Crash and Dump Analysis Tool from LCS

Friends,

This post is about my recent experience on how I went with troubleshooting the frequent AOS Crashes we encountered in one of the client's environment.

Pattern of AX Crash:

We have 4 AOS Servers, 2 of them dedicated to clients and rest of the 2 to share the load for Batches and SSRS Reports.

We had frequent crashes on the 2 AOS's which served the clients. 

How we knew it was a crash ?

Because when the crash happened, all of a sudden both the AOS Services goes into stopped mode - meaning they are no longer running and the users complain they can't connect to AX. It's very frustrating for the users as their application goes down when they are in the middle of something.

Some of the errors seen on the event logs were:

LCS Crash Analysis comes to Rescue:

I came to know there's a cool utility available in LCS known as Crash Dump Analysis. Upon doing some search, I hit upon this interesting blog from MSDN which shows the steps to get started with Crash Analysis

Basically, Crash Dump Analysis is a tool which will help you to evaluate the reason for AOS crash.

The input needed for this tool is a mini dump file which is generated when the AOS crashes. We can think of this similar to a Windows mini dump file which gets generated when Windows OS crashes.

There are many tools available out there to generate the dump file and out of those, I tried WER

WER (Windows Error Reporting) 

WER is built into Windows 2008/2008 R2 can be configured to automatically create and store memory dumps from an AOS crash 

The configuration happens by making some Registry modifications, more concrete creating the following Registry Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\Ax32Serv.exe

In this new Registry Key several Registry Values have to be added as well (DumpFolder, DumpCount, DumpType, CustomDumpFlags).

Please note: 

Do NOT set the DumpType to 1 or 2, but set the DumpType to 0 and set CustomDumpFlags to 7015 decimal (0x1B67 hexadecimal). Invalid settings will generate dumps without the required information.

Below is a snapshot of how the registry looks after I made the change.

There's another good tool Debug Diagnostic Tool (v2) which can also be used to capture dump files. For more detailed insights, please refer to the instructions in this blog

I chose WER as there is no installation needed. It's just enabling some registry keys and it generates the crash dump file. Once a dmp zip file is generated, it serves as the input to your LCS Crash and Dump analysis tool.

A detailed step by step process to upload the dump file is shown here

Some tips when uploading the dmp file:

a. The dmp file needs to be in a zip format before it gets uploaded for analysis

b. I have observed when uploading large files one needs to keep an eye on the browser connection dropout. I just keep the browser active by clicking on the browser address bar

Once the file is uploaded and the analysis is done, it produces a html report. 

The report came with the following recommendations:

a. Recommended Kernel upgrade to CU9 - High risk (340 days old)

b. Recommended hotfixes to be applied related to AOS Crash

c.  Exception - Memory Access violation

In our case, the main reason for the crash was caused due to a Memory Access Violation and this was due to a custom SSRS report run by an user. We fixed that report and now no longer the crash occurs.

So, to conclude, next time when you come across an AOS Crash, it's highly recommended to try out the LCS Crash analysis tool to get to the root of the problem and fix it. Hope this post helps you in getting used to the Crash Analysis tool.