Microsoft is now investing heavily in Life
Cycle Services (LCS) with monthly releases.
One of the most interesting features for
Technical resources is AX Update Installer found under the Updates tile for AX
2012 R3 projects. This is the content after opening the
tile:
After downloading the package, you have to
extract the special build of AXUpdate.exe and then execute AXUpdate.exe to
connect to the project in Life Cycle Services and get the magic started.
I will not go into details around this,
since it is a quite straightforward and self-explaining process. One thing to
mention is the requirement to have the System Diagnostics configured and at
least have uploaded the Discovered Environment once. This uploads (push)
Diagnostics information from your On Premise solution to Life Cycle Services
including Metadata, which is important for several of the technical features in
LCS like Cloud Power Support and Updates.
What I found compelling about the new
AXUpdate approach was that it seemed to address the pain trying to keep up with
the number of hotfixes released both for the application and for binaries. Therefore,
I went through a test earlier in September to see how this really fitted with
the description and my expectations. The expected benefit was to be able to
produce solution specific update packages without the need to identify and
download many individual fixes between Cumulative Updates (a collection of
hotfixes and new features). This would be very efficient in a project where we are
approaching GOLIVE on R3 (CU8 will be the first CU for R3, but no formal
information about expected release date yet).
Everything played surprisingly well and I
managed to update a default AX 2012 R3 solution (Model Store) without any
modifications with approximately 500 application fixes and binaries for all
server roles. The possibility to create and store an Update Package is another
nice feature.
After finishing the Update process including
the The Model Store has been modified Wizard, it was time for QA and I therefore
opened Help > About from the AX Windows Client. As expected I now had many
new Models in the SYP-layer (you get one SYP-model for each KB number), but
when I checked the current Kernel Build number against the latest/current build
number, I discovered that the updated binaries had a lower Build number than
the most recent released Binary Build. This was indeed not the expected outcome…
After a couple of days I ran AXUpdate.exe
again to check if any new hotfixes where available and the answer was zero (0)
applicable updates. I then reviewed one of the first steps in the process after
logging in to LCS called Select updates and this revealed the reason as shown
below (performed October 06):
In the Combobox to Select a group of
updates to evaluate, Most recent was explained as “Contains
all updates until August 04, 2014”.
I have not checked after this, but
Microsoft has for whatever reason defined a limitation on the set of available
updates to include updates until a given date. If this was (is) intentionally it is hard
to understand why since the power of AXUpdate.exe connected to LCS, is to
address the pain of discovering available updates and downloading them
periodically (or when needed) as a package.
I will check this again as soon as LCS is
available (still inaccessible for me) to see what the date limit is right now –
hopefully this was a onetime glitch and not an intended limitation.
Bottom line – do not be surprised if you
do not get all available updates when using AXUpdateInstaller connected to LCS.
I would like to add that this was a possible onetime glitch, but it could also
explain why you do not end up with the updates you expect.
