This release contains the following snap-in applications for use with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and Microsoft Office 2007.

Offline Expense - This snap-in enables expenses to be entered in Excel while disconnected from the corporate network, and then posted to Dynamics AX at a later time. This snap-in uses WCF-based services and LINQ to retrieve data from Dynamics AX, and uses the Application Integration Framework, or AIF to send business documents to Dynamics AX.

Business Data Lookup (BDL) - This snap-in enables information workers to access data from Dynamics AX from within Excel, Word and Outlook. This snap-in is an upgrade of the BDL snap-in that was distributed with Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0.

These applications require .Net 3.5, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. Each snap-in contains a document describing the basic architecture, functional footprint, and deployment steps for exploring the sample code.

We are planning to provide some further documentation on the techniques used to build the new Expense Entry snap-in which employes a WCF-based query service and the LINQ provider. We welcome your feedback and questions on this forum.