Since 2000, Akvelon has maintained a long-lasting partnership with Microsoft, an American multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington.
Client
It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Below are just a few of the projects we have completed for Microsoft over the years.
Accessibility work for MS D365 Finance and Operations
Business need
Microsoft’s mission is to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft is committed to delivering great experiences and customer service to people with disabilities.
Solution
Simplify work with Dynamics 365 apps for people with disabilities.
Benefits and results
Over 170 bugs and tasks has been covered. We fixed bugs and added accessibility support for Dynamics 365 apps which allows users with disabilities to use applications.
Our team worked on desktop, mobile and web apps and added a screen reader support and high contrast schemes.
Technologies Used
WPF,C#, JavaScript, Cordova, Ionic, AngularJS, React
Microsoft Dynamics Cloud Gates (Cloud Optimal Squad)
Business need
Microsoft Dynamics Cloud Gates (Cloud Optimal Squad) is an internal CI/CD system in Microsoft. It is a part of Microsoft version control system, which called Source Depot. Cloud Gates system allows many of Microsoft engineers work together and distribute their changes. The system centralizes the process of building, testing, supporting, files sharing.
Solution
Our team has been working on new infrastructure features, bug fixing, new analytics and managing features for operation team.
Benefits and results
As a result, our team successfully migrated build system from On-premise to Cloud (Azure), implemented web-portal to monitor infrastructure state and manage check-ins created by developers, added a number of monitoring tools which allowed to reduce time for resolving issues and to improve infrastructure health.
Technologies Used
Used technologies: C#, PowerShell, MS SQL, JavaScript\TypeScript, CSS
Environment: MS Visual Studio, VS Code, Azure Cloud, VSTS, GIT
Microsoft AX Data Movement
Business need
MS Axapta Data Movement Framework provides a number of libraries that are used in servicing operations for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. It allows to migrate databases to different types between environments.
The need is to improve quality of the framework by adding automated testing and fixing critical issues.
Solution
Akvelon team was working on fixing product issues in Export/Import functionality, improving performance, improving test infrastructure and fixing unit/integrations tests which cover the most important product functionality.
Benefits and results
- Akvelon team dropped count of failed tests significantly and reached 0 failing tests;
- Akvelon team converted all existing tests which cover important product area to check-in tests which helped to avoid product regressions
- Akvelon team helped to decrease number of product issues and issues reported by customer significantly
Technologies Used
Used technologies: X++, C#, MS SQL Server
Environment: MS Visual Studio, VSTS, Source Depot, Git
Microsoft AX Reporting and Analytics
Business need.
Microsoft Dynamics AX provides online analytical processing (OLAP) functionality through the use of cubes.
These cubes, built on the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services platform, enable you to analyze large amounts of data and identify trends that you might not otherwise discover when viewing data on traditional reports.
Solution
Akvelon team has been working on fixing product issues, improving performance and fixing unit/integrations tests which cover the most important product functionality.
Benefits and Results
- Akvelon team improved speed of deployment analytics services.
- Akvelon team helped decrease number of product issues and issues reported by customer significantly.
Technologies Used
X++, C#, MS SQL Server,SQL Server Reporting Services, Azure Storage, Azure messaging
X++ compiler and runtime
Business need
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations system consists of several large parts. The main part of the system is a platform. The platform includes several components needed to develop Fin & Ops applications: Runtime, Clients, Design Time. Runtime provides a compilation of X++ code in IL code (the code executable by the .net framework). The need is to support the system, evaluate and fix issues in the Runtime component.
Solution
Akvelon team is investigating X++ code of the compiler in order to find any issues and address them. also we’re implementing unit testing to improve overall quality and refactoring code to optimize performance.
Benefits and results
Automated testing and code refactoring should make the platform work faster and make more reliable.
Technologies Used
C#, SourceDepot
D365 Fin&Ops plugins for VS
Business need
The project is a part of Dynamics 365 product that aims to simplify the creation of web pages following the default or custom templates.
Solution
Akvelon team is working on developing a visual designer for Dynamics 365. The designer comes as a plugin for Visual Studio, has familiar to users interface and tools.
Benefits and results
Akvelon developers made an impact into the project development by refactoring automated tests used for project verification and built new features that enabled users to easily and quickly create MS Dynamics 365 web pages.
Technologies Used
X++
Kernel Solutions Export
Business need
The main goal is to provide a possibility to quickly and effectively work with existing MS projects and solutions contained in those projects.
Solution
Akvelon developers are decomposing complex projects into several separate solutions preserving their functionality. Being separate the solutions become easier to use, reuse and edit.
Benefits
Akvelon provided MS with the means of simplification and as a result speeding up the work with complex projects. It became easier to access, use and update the separate solutions that earlier were a part of huge projects.
Technologies Used
C#, js, powershell, sql, git, source depot, VSTS
Dynamics Axapta build support
Business need
The main goal is to deliver changes and improvements made by developers in new versions of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations to end users as quickly as possible. Another goal is to provide AX developers with required infrastructure and help with resolving their issues.
Solution
Akvelon team is supporting overall infrastructure to keep build system up and running. Maintaining environment. Issuing VMs for Dynamics AX developers and solving infrastructure problems. Monitoring checkins and gates. Resolving build breaks. Responsible for Freebird machines. Automating routine tasks and improving current system.
Benefits and results
As a result, Akvelon built a team of engineers who are responsible for 24/7 support of the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations infrastructure and build system. A number of monitoring tools added which allowed to reduce time for resolving issues and improved overall infrastructure health. Time to commit and verify changes made by developers reduced, thus time needed to deliver updated versions to end users reduced as well. And we continue to work on optimization and improvements.
Technologies Used
Used languages: PowerShell, C#
Tools: GCM, TFS, other internal tools for monitoring and reporting.
Development Environment: Windows PowerShell ISE, MS Visual Studio 2010
LCS Diagnostics Portal
Business Need
- Automation of release build sign-off process
- Automation of routine tasks related to SQL Performance troubleshooting
Solution
Diagnostics Portal helps customers to identify any issues with on premise and azure hosted environments deployed under LCS project. It also get quick access to any logs (Web and DB server) and allows to view resources usage and performance statistics. In addition it reminds users to install required updates on their environments and give recommendations how to troubleshoot issues and improve performance.
Benefits and results
- Our team set up complete set of automated request-response test in order to discover regression issues before release.
- Developed new tool of the portal which allows to identify and fix SQL Performance issues.
Technologies Used
Azure, MS VS, MS SQL Management Studio, Azure Storage Explorer, Kusto, VSTS, Windows Server, Knockout, ASP.NET MVC + EF, GIT
AX RunTime Kernel
Business need
The main goal is to reduce the number of issues experienced by customers. The Akvelon team has to fix runtime issues, investigate memory dumps in case of high memory consumption or CPU utilization and provide actual information regarding a weekly crash analysis.
Solution
Akvelon has been working on fixing issues at kernel project, issue related to memory leaks, heap corruptions, deadlocks. Also working on dumps analysis/crash analysis.
Benefits and Results
As a result, Akvelon engineers helped to reach the main goals of Microsoft team: reduce the number of issues experienced by customers, improve the functionality and maintainability of the application. A number of run time bugs were fixed and some key features were implemented. Moreover the team worked on a weekly crash analysis that provided the ability to find a new possible regressions and fix them as soon as possible.
Technologies Used
C#, C++, X++, MS SQL
