The Dynamics GP Blogster

If you have been around Microsoft Dexterity long enough, by now you are already aware that Dex is not an object oriented development environment, and rather supports a concept called object-based development. In the traditional sense, Dexterity does not allow you to define classes and derive objects from those classes. However, someone figured out that a Dexterity form can act as a container or class, with the Scripts and Functions tabs allowing you to define the contructors, destructors and methods for the class. In addition, adding fields to a window and setting the proper values for those fields allows developers to set the state of an object. Given the nature of the form and how the scripts on that form are called, and the values for fields on windows are set, forms can simulate classes with public and private methods in traditional object oriented programming terms. Thank goodness, you don't need to do all this in Visual Studio! VST allows you to define a WinForm , or in simp...

" By definition... I could not take either the customer's side or the partner's side in my assessment" My new article on MSDynamicsWorld is up! In this article, I discuss a specific case that happened a few months aback in which I had a chance not to play the devil's advocate, but rather the devils' advocate -- If you are familiar with the English language grammar, you probably know the distinction between devil's and devils'. Please read the article as it contains important information about my professional experiences as a consultant working with Microsoft Dynamics GP customers and partners and gives an insight into what's happening in the implementation world. Until next post! MG.- Mariano Gomez, MVP Maximum Global Business, LLC http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com

For the past few months I took it up on myself to produce a translated Russian version of Dynamics GP. What began as fun little project in response to seeing a lot of GP information in Russian on Partnersource, is now showing some remarkable results. I have managed to translate 45% of the string resources and adjust the screens accordingly aided by numerous accounting software books I ordered from Moscow -- and my wife who is from Moscow herself :-) -- to get the proper terms and meaning in place. Here is a sample of some of the screens (more to come), Dynamics GP Login Window Account Maintenance Window Customer Maintenance Window Unlike Chinese or Korean, the Cyrilic alphabet is not a double-byte alphabet and can easily be managed by Dexterity. However, this project was met with its own set of challenges when I started the translation process, for example, how to get Microsoft Windows to display Cyrilic characters to begin with. I sorted this out by installing Dynamics GP on a server ...

The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog has a post up on my efforts and contributions to build 11 of Support Debugging Tool . The article highlights my input to the email engine now available in SDT. To read the full article, click here . Until next post! MG.- Mariano Gomez, MVP Maximum Global Business, LLC http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

I wanted to provide a video update of the "Hello World!" project as the feedback and reception of the series has been tremendous. I am currently working on a second article to demonstrate data access and storage and the use of WinForms and will have it out before next Wednesday. In the mean time, enjoy parts 1, 2, and 3 of the "Hello World!" project! Videos are best viewed in Internet Explorer at 200% of the current size . Until next post! MG.- Mariano Gomez, MVP Maximum Global Business, LLC http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Fellow Microsoft Dynamics GP MVP Monzer Osama is organizing the 1st Online Conference for Great Plains Arabia community - http://www.GP4Arab.com/forum . Monzer is the founder and moderator of this leading GP community in the Middle East of more than 2,000 partners and users. Monzer elaborates, " I will talk about how to connect Microsoft Excel to Microsoft SQL Server externally, and using Pivot tables and Pivot Charts as a reporting and analysis tools , then I will explain how that data will [refresh] automatically. " Sessions will be conducted in a workshop format, making the agenda very hands-on. If you are interested in joining the event, here is the session information: Event link: http://gp4arab.eventbrite.com/ Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Time: 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM (Saudi Arabia Time zone GMT+0300) Monzer will attempt to present this session in English at a later date. Until next post! MG.- Mariano Gomez, MVP Maximum Global Business, LLC http://www.maximumglobalbu...

Adventures of a Microsoft Dexterity Developer Okay, so we did not get this far to bring up a "Hello World" message, but I figured that's a pretty standard thing to do in the software development world to introduce a tool or language to software developers, so I am not going to pass upon the chance! Creating our first Visual Studio Tools project... with a twist! For this project, we want to be able to register two events that will allow us to display the messages "Getting ready to say Hello World!" and "Hello World" messages after login is successful and before and after the Toolbar form is loaded. Usually, this method of trigger registration is used by Dexterity developers to run code after log in, so I figured I would replicate something we are most familiar with. Topics being covered Creating a VST project Events registration Running your code before and after login Building and Deploying VST project Let's get started! 1) Open Visual Studio. Go t...

"A beta VPC image for GP11.0 will likely be available in the winter of 2009/2010" In reading carefull through the latest blog article posted by the Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management & Marketing team , I found, burried at the end, likely timeframes for the availability of "v11" beta and General Availability demo images. Ben Courin, author of the article, says: " In the August/September timeframe, we will be releasing a differencing disk with the Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 SP4. No additional improvements, just the SP install. We will then take a few weeks off from building images, and then turn our focus to the Microsoft Dynamics GP 11.0 VPC/Technical Demonstration toolkit. This project will be built from scratch/from the ground up. It will NOT be an upgrade of the current Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 series of vpc’s. A beta VPC image for GP11.0 will likely be available in the winter of 2009/2010 and then a GA image will likely be available at Conver...

For the longest time I had been trapped in my own Microsoft Dexterity development shell and could not see why anyone would want to integrate to Dynamics GP with anything that is not Dexterity -- I am not referring to simple customizations here! After all, Dexterity is (and will continue being for years to come!) the native development environment of Dynamics GP. So, the next obvious question in my mind was, why couldn't .NET developers learn Dexterity? After all, we were here first! But, then I decided to spin the question around, why couldn't Dexterity developers learn .NET? Now, that's a challenge I like!! In the next 2 weeks I will publish a set of articles showing Dexterity developers that it is possible to make a relatively smooth transition to .NET development with Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP -- by far, the longest name for any Microsoft product, so we will shorten that to VST. The similarities What you will find as a Microsoft Dexterity developer ...

Folks across the pond use payment terms and due dates that are not traditionally close the ones we are familiar with on this side of the hemisphere. "End of Month + Net Days" (EOM+ND) is a typical case. In EOM+ND payment terms, an invoice becomes due a number of net days after the last day of the month for the invoice date. For example, if an invoice date is July 16 and we are on a payment term of EOM plus 45 net days, the invoice will not be due until September 14 -- or 45 days from July 31. Of course, you cannot manage this type of payment term request in GP, not out-of-the-box anyways, which most of the time will require a customization to deal with the issue. In this article, I will examine setting up two SQL Server triggers: one on the PM Transaction Open File (dbo.PM20000) and another on the RM Open File (dbo.RM20101) tables. The triggers will use the Net Days field in the Payment Terms Master (dbo.SY03300) table to calculate the net days after the end of month to as...

If you have worked with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in either Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 , you may have inadvertly overlooked one of its key features: Standard Reports . Standard Reports are Reporting Services (SSRS) reports that can provide all sort of statuses and and information about the database engine and its management components and well as the databases themselves in real time -- the reports are refreshable! When executed, the reports are embedded in tabs within a new SSMS tab. As a consultant, I find these reports particularly useful when attempting to establish the health of a Microsoft Dynamics GP SQL Server installation. I can immediately relay critical SQL Server performance information to my clients and suggest preventative or corrective actions to mitigate the issues, saving them money in the process. So lets take a look at the available reports by node... Node Report Server Server Dashboard Server Configuration Changes History Serv...

How many times have you performed an upgrade just to realize with the first posting that some stored procedure is missing or did not -- for some misterious reason -- get created, yet the upgrade completed with no errors? This is especially true when upgrading from several versions aback, when the upgrade path is not too clear, or you have forgotten to apply that critical service pack that would avoided some of the missing objects issues you are now experiencing. I recently came across a user who wanted to recreate all SmartList Builder objects because they suspected something was wrong with the installation, however, they did not want to have to use the backend to recreate all the stored procs used by SLB, because of the " fair of missing something or endup damaging something else "... you know what they say... the client is always right! (not always, but that's the topic of another article). After scratching my head for a few moments, the answer came in the form of the ...

I am always amazed at the things you can do with Microsoft Dynamics GP. Just recently, a user pointed out that the Days for Checks to Clear field on the Vendor Credit Summary window was always blank and that they needed this field to update automatically . According to the help file, the field is defined as " View or change the average number of days that a check you issue to the vendor usually takes to clear your bank. ", in other words, you can manually update it if you need to track this data. The user also pointed out that they performed daily bank reconciles and that the Cleared Date column in the CM Transaction ( dbo .CM20200 ) table was reflective of the actual check cleared date in the bank and that they would like to use this field to update the Days for Checks to Clear field in the Vendor Credit Summary window. After all, the date value of the Cleared Date column only gets updated when the check is marked as cleared during a checkbook reconciliation process an...

A big "Thank You!" to the folks at Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award Program and to Melissa Travers , my MVP lead for 1 more year of this prestigious award...that's right, 1 more year! It's truly an honor to serve (and continue serving) the Dynamics GP community. For those of you who have asked about the program, the Microsoft MVP Award Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The MVP Award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing their real-world expertise with technology users. The MVP Award celebrates the most active community members from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference in technical communities that feature Microsoft products MVPs are not Microsoft employees, n...