Bojan Jovičić

Microsoft Sinergija (Synergy) 2011

Bojan Jovičić — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 02:01:00 -0700

This year I will be speaking at the annual Microsoft conference Sinergija 2011 (Sinergy).

As a CIO I am very proud that this year there are even two speakers from our company's IT team, beside myself. This is a significant acknowledgement both to the whole company as well as to my work in inspiring and motivating others to grow and learn, but also to join the community and share the knowledge (starting with 2009 when one of my associates held one track, to 2010 and this with two of my associates being presenters).

You are kindly invited to come and check their sessions:

- System Center Service Manager – Implementing ITIL framework on 19.10. at 10:30 - 11:30.
- Data Mining In Retail Industry on 20.10. at 16:00 - 17:00.

As for me, I will be doing five tracks. The most important is Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 (a new version of Microsoft's Flagship ERP system). I will be doing a session on Agile and also three community tracks (one of them is Microsoft Dynamics Meetup).

Community tracks are free, so anyone can come (more info: http://msacademic.rs/News.aspx?id=588).

Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

Bojan Jovičić — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 23:07:00 -0700

I recently got my hands on hard copy of an excellent book of James Coplien - Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development. I was one of the reviewers for the book and have only the words of praise for it.

This book brings the world of the architecture right in the context of agile. If you are using Lean, Scrum, XP or any of the other agile approaches in any of the roles in the process, this is the book for you. If focuses on the collaborative approach as one of the key success factors of the good development teams. Written in the clear and understandable tone, with the concrete samples in almost every popular language, you will get your hands deep on the new approach that is complimentary with the idea of the book.

James was one of the main promoters of Scrum in Serbia and has already twice visited our country and passed a part of his knowledge without compensation.

The book is currently top title on Amazon for agile and architecture. If you have space to order it, I think this is an excellent choice.

Microsoft Dynamics AX - Remedy for slow Microsoft Excel import

Bojan Jovičić — Sun, 29 May 2011 04:58:00 -0700

Recently I have been asked to help with solving an issue that involved reading data from Microsoft Excel (xls format) into Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Original approach was used with default set of classes for Microsoft Excel (SysExcelApplication, SysExcelWorksheets, SysExcelWorksheet, etc.). The excel file in question was very small but with a rather large number of columns (~150). About 200 reads were made per row. What made us investigate this further was the fact that import was quite slow. After doing some basic profiling (we used Microsoft .NET's System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch so we can cross-compare the results) we found out that the time required to process one row increases almost exponentially.

After that we developed a small application in Microsoft.NET/C# (with Microsoft Visual Studio) that was reading data from Excel using OleDbConnection class and saving it in Microsoft Dynamics AX using .NET Business Connector. The increase in speed was several orders of magnitude but what is also important is that near exponential growth of time per row was missing.

We then applied the same principle with Microsoft Dynamics in X++ using its set of classes for ADO access (CCADOConnection, CCADOCommand, CCADORecordset). The speed was still around 100 times greater than with default approach and ~2.5 times slower than .NET. With this set of classes we were lacking the ability to do arbitrary (e.g. accessing the previous row values) row access like in .NET, so some caching was needed. Still the speed increase was incredible. Below is the graph of time needed (in milliseconds) to process one row with all three approaches.

If you haven't tried this apporach, I suggest it. For it will surely outweight the time needed for implementation, especially with bigger or files with many columns. Connection string and row selection query (you can remove absolute row range) for .NET and X++ should look something like this:

connectionString = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" + "Data Source=" + filename + ";" + "Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;";
rowQuery = strfmt("SELECT * FROM [Excel 8.0;HDR=NO;IMEX=1;Database=%1;].[%2$%3]", filename, "OrderWorkSheet", "A:EJ");

Update: Zubair got in contact with me regarding this and here you can find full X++ samples for XLS and XLSX.

Microsoft Dynamics & the Cloud

Bojan Jovičić — Tue, 10 May 2011 12:03:00 -0700

Recently I have been asked by Software Advice (click here to visit their site) to share their interview about Microsoft Dynamics and the cloud with Marie Huwe, General Manager of Marketing for Microsoft Dynamics.

The interview is 14 minutes long and presents Microsoft's roadmap for getting Microsoft Dynamics products in the cloud. You will hear about cloud partner profitability guide, cloud best practices, Dynamics marketplace and other cool tools that Microsoft is planning to apply. For me it looks best that some of these tools will be powered and will be accessible by Microsoft CRM which itself is the first one of Microsoft Dynamics products which is already in the cloud. You see the interview here.

Here is the link to Cloud partner profitability guide and one other pointer related to cloud and Microsoft Dynamics AX with focus on version 2012.

Retail IT Summit 2011

Bojan Jovičić — Sun, 08 May 2011 07:01:00 -0700

This is one of the conferences where I initally planned to attend because of industrial focus (retail), but I got invited by organizers to present instead.

The event will bring together representatives of leading retail chains in Serbia, who will attend a one day event (10th May 2011) on which they will follow the presentations and exhibitions of the biggest international experts in retail area (you can get more info and detailed list of exibitors here).

I will be presenting about our way of working with focus on our award winning in-house developed retail solution and its application in sports and fashion retail, with brief touch on our ERP system: Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Decisions Spring 2011

Bojan Jovičić — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:06:00 -0700

To my great pleasure, I have been asked again to speak about Agile Software Development and Microsoft Dynamics AX at one of the greatest virtual conferences on Microsoft Dynamics products: Decisions!

MSDynamicsWorld.com has been hosting these semiannual events for a couple of years now, and they are tremendous, free resources for learning and networking. This time it is spring version, and is again features 4 days dedicated to different Dynamics products, as shown on promo below:

One interesting thing is that expert will be answering questions from the audience through live chat after the sessions. And you may want to consider stopping in to the networking lounge at the event as well and continuing the conversation with the presenters or other attendees, as that tends to get some lively discussion. If you already attended this event, then you know from your own experiences how interesting this can be.

Here are the links for programs for individual days:

June 14 - AX Day - http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/content/dynamics-ax-day-program
June 15 - GP Day - http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/content/dynamics-gp-day-program
June 16 - NAV Day - http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/content/dynamics-nav-day-program
June 17 - CRM Day - http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/content/dynamics-crm-day-program

And you can register here.

Good Old AI & Microsoft Dynamics AX

Bojan Jovičić — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 22:26:00 -0700

This winter I had lot of opportunities to speak in academic circles. In a sense the presentation was similar to my lecture about Microsoft Dynamics AX to future managers at Belgrade University, but this time the audience was the group that I belong to and which focuses on AI (Artificial Intelligence) application in academic and practical fields.

Good Old AI is an internationally recognized network of award-winning researchers, engineers, and students working in the fields of applied artificial intelligence and software engineering, situated at the University of Belgrade. Almost all the people in the group are young, talented and very motivated researchers or people from the AI field with very deep technical knowledge (here is the link to most of people from the group).

My session was attuned to this so this time it was very technical and was trying to show how easy it is to create new functionalities in Microsoft Dynamics AX and how it is easy to use its out-of-the-box CI (Continuous Integration) capabilities to support agile approaches like Scrum or how to extend it to support high quality development trough software metrics. Here is a more detailed report about my session at Good Old AI's website: http://www.goodoldai.org/node/643.

PKB - Agile Project Management

Bojan Jovičić — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:40:00 -0700

Belgrade Chamber of Commerce is hosting a mini event about agile project management. The event is supported by PMI (Project Management Institute) Serbia and our Agile Serbia user group.

There will be a presentation of a resarch about software project approaches used in Serbia, we will hear what is happening with PMI and Agile and I will speak about Scrum.

If you are interested to come (21 Apr 2011, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM) you can find more details at http://www.scrumalliance.org/events/334-pkb--agile-project-management.

Microsoft WinDays 2011

Bojan Jovičić — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:17:00 -0700

I was really delighted to be accepted to present at the biggest IT conference in Croatia - Microsoft WinDays. This is a conference with a long tradition and splendid organization.

Being the first person to present about Microsoft Dynamics AX, I was really enthusiastic about it. The track showed key business advantages but also the technical resons with focus on agile. It went well and it was nice to see that Microsoft Dynamics AX is used in Croatia.

Conference was held in beautiful seaside town of Rovinj.

Microsoft MVP Award - Dynamics AX for second time

Bojan Jovičić — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:40:00 -0700

Yesterday I was notified by Microsoft that I have been re-awarded as MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Dynamics AX. Same as last year this is a great honour for me, especially with so few MVPs in Microsoft Dynamics AX field.

You can see who are some of the new MVPs in CEE in this award cycle here. Congratulations to them and to all other re-awarded MVPs.

I will do my best to continue helping the community in future, as I did in past.