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Comment by martijn_himself | Hacker News Reader

The good part is perhaps that all these applications are going to have to be rewritten at some point in the future on a different platform. I'm a Microsoft developer on Dynamics and it is unbearable (comparable to SharePoint).

The gap between a native consumer and 'enterprise' application experience only seems to be widening.

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Do you mean Dynamics CRM?

Or Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (formerly Dynamics AX)?

Or one of the other Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics SL, Dynamics C5?

They are all under this umbrella brand, but quite different software products.

I have only been exposed to Dynamics CRM (Dynamics CRM 2011 through to Dynamics 365) I must admit. I can't imagine the experience for these other product strands to be much better for developers let alone users though.

As a developer who has to use Dynamics I can't even imagine having to develop on it. My heart goes out to you.

I have a great sympathy for any developer that must work with/on/for Dynamics. I've been Dynamics-adjacent enough to see some of the pain secondhand and lucky enough not to experience it firsthand.

The very well maintained MSDN documentation pages for X++ are some of my favorite pages to send to developer friends as the developer equivalent of "ghost stories" when you sit around fireside chatting about the Daily WTF or MUMPS.

The X++ stuff is for the product formerly known as AX though? Based on my experience with AX its a lot nicer than JDE or SAP.

To my knowledge, X++ has been supported by the entire Dynamics line at various points in time. I remember hearing some complaints about it in Dynamics CRM more than a decade ago...

To be fair to X++, yes most everything its competitors do are worse, but being the best at being the worst is a strange and dubious honor. Similarly, X++ has done a lot of work to somewhat keep up with the times including a deeper integration into/with the .NET CLR allowing for better interop with Microsoft's DevDiv languages, etc.

That's part of what makes it such a good ghost story is that it is well maintained, has good intentions, has been somewhat modernized and more. But it's still a chimera of a language whose origination story was "we need bits of C++, XML, and SQL smashed into the same language".

Might that have been the "CRM" element of AX rather than the separate Dynamics CRM - which seems to be a completely different beast technically to the other members of the Dynamics family (if you can call things a family when they are so loosely related...).

Yes, may have been Dynamics AX CRM or some cross-work between CRM and AX CRM. Another place where Microsoft Sales & Marketing muddies the waters and confuses similar but different products, hah.

(My adjacency at the time was as an intern in Dynamics building way back in Ought Six, having lunch and listening to complaints from fellow interns. I wasn't working on Dynamics at the time, I was interning on the very cool Small Business Accounting [RIP] program that shared entirely no DNA with AX or Dynamics other than building space, because there wasn't a good way to make an AX Lite. Given the distance in time and space, forgive a forgetful mind. :)

As an older, former developer who has pretty much decided to pursue a career in MS Dynamics, I am having a great deal of difficulty trying to find useful information on which "track" to pursue, especially considering the change (?) Dynamics365 may be bringing to the model. (By track I mean, which product to focus on, AX vs CRM I assume are the most reasonable options, and technical vs functional (if that's the correct terminology)). And, where best to find good training and a strategy for getting one's foot into the door.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Curious...if you need advice on this, what led you to decide it was the one thing worth pursuing?

It seems like one of the few technical fields (outside of pure dev) left that has possibly somewhat safe jobs for the time being, and seems safer from being automated or optimized away. On top of an already tough tech job market, Canada has recently passed new legislation allowing companies to import tech works in less than two weeks with no requirement to prove they can't find local resources. I'm looking for something technical with an English language skills barrier, that is also useful for eventually immigrating to the United States.

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