Leaving the comfort zone

I am betting that over the next couple of years quite many people will have to go through a significant learning curve stepping out from their current comfort zone.

I am referring to many of the technical people spending the majority of their time inside "MorphX" (Dynamics AX development environment) or the equivalent Dynamics NAV development environment, "C/SIDE".

So far quite many ERP developers have been living inside a fairly protected environment. They have been able to focus on datamodelling and business logic without worrying too much about aspects of software architecture, design patterns, security, authentication, performance, user experience etc. Things which developers working from scratch spend quite a lot of time on before they can get to actually write the app functionality. Good for developer productivity (let Microsoft worry about these things) but perhaps not so future proof in terms of having a career as developer.

This is my brain storm list of technologies which I would consider if I was an AX developer today. Simply because I believe this is where the AX direction is going. The good news is that there are even more developers out there which knows about where we are heading than developers knowing where we are coming from.

• From MorphX to Team Foundation Server
• From X++ to C#
• From AIF to Webservices and WSDL's
• From flat files to XML and SOAP
• From SQL to SQL Azure
• From Intellimorph thick client to HTML/Javascript/JSON/Entity framework
• From manual test to Microsoft Test Manager/Lab Manager, coded UI and SoapUI 
• From Word to on-line HTML documentation

For many this will mean leaving the comfort zone. The ones being succesful are probabely the ones taking up the challenge.