In this chapter, we familiarized ourselves with the service architecture. We clearly saw that Microsoft has put a lot of effort into providing us with a simplified administration process for services by introducing integration ports. Because a large part of the architecture is built on WCF, at least a basic understanding of the technologies that are used in WCF is needed.

To enable all of these technologies in combination with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, compilation into CIL was introduced. This allows the X++ code to be compiled into CIL and benefit from all of the advantages CIL has to offer.

In the next chapter, we will start digging deeper into the AIF services and get some hands-on time by creating our own AIF services.