Tuesday, July 01, 2014

AX separated instances on Windows taskbar

This one is a little trick that I find very useful.

If you have to work with multiple AX instances, you will surely get annoyed by the way windows group the icons on the taskbar.

Multiple instances of the same program are not grouped separately, thus it get very hard to switch between a window or another.


Having separated AX instances on the taskbar is much better, imho


To accomplish that you have to create an hard link to the AX32 executable on the filesystem, like that:
  1. Open command prompt (CMD.exe)
  2. Go to the AX installation folder (usally C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX\50\Client\Bin)
  3. Create N hard link for every different instance of AX:

    mklink /h ax32_DEV.exe ax32.exe
    mklink /h ax32_PROD.exe ax32.exe



  4. Create a shortcut to the newly created file (ax32_DEV.exe) wherever you want, and edit the shortcut to open the specific AXC file pointing to the desired AX instance.


  5. Open AX from that shortcut
That should work with Windows 7, 8, Vista and XP

Have fun