Coffee Stain

W e've been using Visual Studio Team Services  (VSO) on several projects as or project management and version control solutions for Dynamics AX successfully for several years.  Recently though, AX occasionally presents us with one of these gems when logging into the client: "TF237121: Cannot complete the operation. An unexpected error occurred." and "Failed to update metadata cache. (Object Model)". You may have seen this error before.  Generally, from my experience, this coincides with an update that Microsoft has pushed to VSO. The fix is generally quite simple:  Navigate to C:\Users\[Your User]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\3.0\Cache and delete all the files in that directory.  You may see several versions; 3.0 is the version AX 2012 R3 uses. Upon clearing the cache and restarting the AX client, the issue goes away and you can happily version control again. However, a few days ago, this fix stopped working for us.  No matter how mu...

T he Find feature in AX 2012 is an extremely useful tool, but it can be a bit tricky to use, especially when searching for text with special characters. One common example is using the Find function to find all the instances in code where a specific enumeration value is used. Ideally, once would just enter the value, such as in the following screenshot. Unfortunately, the above search will return no results.  Unintuitively, special characters (such as the double colons "::") must be escaped with a back slash in order for them to be treated as literal string characters.  The following search produces the desired results. Other special characters (such as < and >, among others) must also be escaped in this way.  This is because the Find dialog uses regular expressions, which in itself opens up a many options for customizing your search. In fact, the search algorithm uses the AX  match()  function behind the scenes to resolve the search.  D...