This is the second in a series of articles on the developer experience with the Dynamics AX 4.0 adapter for BizTalk Server 2006. This article focuses on a show stopper issue that showed up as my team started testing our integration solution.
The early webcast showing how to use the Dynamics AX 4.0 adapter for BizTalk Server 2006 was a very trivial example full of assumptions about the development environment. Most notable of the assumptions was that BizTalk Server and Dynamics AX reside on the same server. With everything on the same server, everything worked just fine.
At my client, things worked well during development until we deployed our solution to a working test environment where BizTalk Server and Dynamics AX were deployed on different machines. Upon sending a messages to AX via the adapter, an exception was immediately reported in the application event log. The reported exception is listed below:
“Microsoft Dynamics AX” on send port “SomeAXPort” with URI “ax://<ip>:<port>” is suspended.
Error details: An unexpected failure occurred while processing a message. The following error has occured: Failed to connect to an IPC Port: The system cannot find the file specified.
The team executed the same test in another multi-server environment and encountered the same problem.
After scratching our heads for a while, we decided to the get the Dynamics AX development team involved. The lead developer sent a debug version of the RTM’ed code base for the Dynamics AX 4.0 adapter in order to execute some tracing logic. Of course, that version ran without any issues. The developer assure me that the only difference was that the code base was compiled in debug mode on his workstation. No one could explain why the debug and release version behaved differently.
At this time, my understanding is that the updated binaries would be available as a hotfix on a case by case basis. I also heard, but have not been able to confirm, that this issue is resolved in the Dynamics AX 4.0 SP2 release.