Windows 8 and the Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client Series - Update
Since the last time I blogged about Web Client and Windows 8, a lot has transpired since - and I mean a lot! You can read the complete series of previous articles here:
Windows 8 and the Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client Series - Wrap Up
The first major development is, since the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Beta code was released on PartnerSource, around the time of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Airlift 2012 event in Fargo, the Microsoft Dynamics GP development team has put out two major build updates - internally, they continue to create builds almost on a daily basis to keep up with testing demands.
The two builds I have received so far (12.00.1118 and 12.00.1204) have been pretty darn stable on Windows 8 Professional and Windows Server 2012 Standard editions, with the latter build featuring a blazing fast - and I mean super fast - web client. Much faster than the Beta release and certainly much faster than build 12.00.1118.
The second major development is the web client installation process now adds a few more setup screens (I will follow up in a new article), creates one more database for the Session Central service (GPWEBCLIENTSESSIONCENTRAL), and automatically install the certificates for Silverlight access to the local resources on your computer - the Silverlight certificate installer works well on Windows Server 2008 R2, but had issues with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, since the certificate stores are slightly different on these releases of Windows. We (with the help of Aaron Donat) completed the certificate installation manually, which wasn't much of a big deal.
If installing Multi-Tenant Services, the main item to keep in mind is that the user account that is running the Application Pools MUST NOT BE an administrator account - I ran into this issue and this is probably what was causing the following error when attempting to access the Web Management Console.
The only solution to this problem (at the moment) is to uninstall web client and reinstall using a non-admin user for the Application Pool. The installer takes care of setting the proper SQL Server permissions for the account to be used on the application pool.
In summary, if you are going to use the same user account for ALL of the services, then you won’t be able to get into the Web Management Console. Please use a different account for the Application Pools. All other services could use the same account if desired - even on a Single Machine deployment.
Some of the logging options have also changed with build 12.00.1204 (and presumably any new build after that). In order to get the exceptions to appear in the Dynamics Event Log or back to the Errors.aspx page, the web.config file must be edited to include additional information right after the closing system.servicemodel tag and between the system.diagnostics tags. This will start dumping the exceptions to the Dynamics event log. This should be incorporated as part of the web.config by the time Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 is ready to be shipped.
If you also want to have the stack trace dumped out to the Errors.aspx page as well, add the following KEY to the appSettings section and set the value to true.
Stay tuned for my next article which will walk through the new installation procedures for web client and keep an eye over at Developing for Dynamics GP for new articles further detailing some of these changes.
Until next post!
MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/
Windows 8 and the Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client Series - Wrap Up
The first major development is, since the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Beta code was released on PartnerSource, around the time of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Airlift 2012 event in Fargo, the Microsoft Dynamics GP development team has put out two major build updates - internally, they continue to create builds almost on a daily basis to keep up with testing demands.
The two builds I have received so far (12.00.1118 and 12.00.1204) have been pretty darn stable on Windows 8 Professional and Windows Server 2012 Standard editions, with the latter build featuring a blazing fast - and I mean super fast - web client. Much faster than the Beta release and certainly much faster than build 12.00.1118.
The second major development is the web client installation process now adds a few more setup screens (I will follow up in a new article), creates one more database for the Session Central service (GPWEBCLIENTSESSIONCENTRAL), and automatically install the certificates for Silverlight access to the local resources on your computer - the Silverlight certificate installer works well on Windows Server 2008 R2, but had issues with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, since the certificate stores are slightly different on these releases of Windows. We (with the help of Aaron Donat) completed the certificate installation manually, which wasn't much of a big deal.
If installing Multi-Tenant Services, the main item to keep in mind is that the user account that is running the Application Pools MUST NOT BE an administrator account - I ran into this issue and this is probably what was causing the following error when attempting to access the Web Management Console.
The only solution to this problem (at the moment) is to uninstall web client and reinstall using a non-admin user for the Application Pool. The installer takes care of setting the proper SQL Server permissions for the account to be used on the application pool.
In summary, if you are going to use the same user account for ALL of the services, then you won’t be able to get into the Web Management Console. Please use a different account for the Application Pools. All other services could use the same account if desired - even on a Single Machine deployment.
Some of the logging options have also changed with build 12.00.1204 (and presumably any new build after that). In order to get the exceptions to appear in the Dynamics Event Log or back to the Errors.aspx page, the web.config file must be edited to include additional information right after the closing system.servicemodel tag and between the system.diagnostics tags. This will start dumping the exceptions to the Dynamics event log. This should be incorporated as part of the web.config by the time Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 is ready to be shipped.
 |
| Web.config |
If you also want to have the stack trace dumped out to the Errors.aspx page as well, add the following KEY to the appSettings section and set the value to true.
Stay tuned for my next article which will walk through the new installation procedures for web client and keep an eye over at Developing for Dynamics GP for new articles further detailing some of these changes.
Until next post!
MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/
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