The Dynamics GP Blogster

How about this 2014 year, ah? Two major releases in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R2 only to top off the year with the recent release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 . More than 30 new features in 2013 R2 (over 150 if you include those released in GP 2013 RTM) and now over 120 new features in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015, including the cornerstone .NET interoperability and Service Based Architecture components, it's no wonder why the Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management and Product Development teams deserve a massive showing of the hands on this one! Congratulations team on a job well done. Let's not forget about the events either: the wildly successful Microsoft Convergence 2014 Atlanta , the hugely concurred GPUG Summit 2014 St. Louis , and what's got to be the most anticipated partner event since the days of Stampede, reIMAGINE 2014 in Fargo. All these events drove the vision of t Travel was also off the chain for me: Johannesburg, South Africa; St. Louis,...

As many of you prepare to celebrate these Holidays in company of your loved ones, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you the best on behalf of my family. Whether this year has been good, bad or indifferent to you, embrace the ones around you and take comfort in knowing that you are in the company of the people you care about and who care about you. Thanks for all the great comments posted throughout the year and the support you have shown to The Dynamics GP Blogster  throughout all the different social outlets you follow me on. It keeps me going and working to bring you the some of the best content you will find about all things Dynamics GP: the events, the technical articles, the series, and much more. You can always count on 2015 bringing new and exciting articles with innovative approaches for using Microsoft Dynamics GP and getting the best out of your investment. I leave you now with Ms. Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé performing one of the ...

If you enjoyed the concert last year with Fun (see Microsoft Dynamics Convergence Atlanta 2014 - Day 3 ) you will be more than happy to know that OneRepublic  -- not a typo -- has accepted Microsoft's invitation to entertain the attending Convergence 2015 crowd.   OneRepublic - From left to right: Eddie Fisher, Zack Filkins, Ryan Tedder, Brent Kutzle, and Drew Brown OneRepublic is an American pop rock band formed in 2002 by Ryan Tedder and Zack Filkins. Originally signed with Velvet Hammer, an outfit under the Columbia Records umbrella, they were dropped 2 months before the debut of their first album. They successfully released their debut set Dreaming Out Loud in 2007. The album included the smash single “ Apologize ,” mixed by Timbaland , which shattered digital sales and airplay records worldwide and received a Grammy nomination. The band’s sophomore album, 2009’s Waking Up , produced three singles: “ All the Right Moves ,” “ Se...

It's that time of the year again. While we prepare to celebrate the holidays, be it Christmas, Hanukkah, Milad un Nabi, or simply enjoy a good time off with family and friends, it is also time to begin thinking about 2015. The next major event in sight, of course, is Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2015 Atlanta  and who better to open the event that Microsoft's newly minted Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella . Satya Nadella Before being named CEO in February 2014, Nadella held leadership roles in both enterprise and consumer businesses across the company. Joining Microsoft in 1992, he quickly became known as a leader who could span a breadth of technologies and businesses to transform some of Microsoft’s biggest product offerings. Most recently, Nadella was executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group. In this role he led the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business, which outperformed the market and took share f...

As a follow up to my post yesterday (see Microsoft Dynamics GP backups with Windows Azure Blob Storage Service ), an issue has been identified with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 running on SQL Server 2014 when choosing Microsoft Azure storage as the destination for the backup. You will receive the following warning message: The SQL Server version that you are using does not support backing up or restoring your database from Microsoft Azure storage. I have traced the issue back to the logic in the '(L) RGRestoreBackupOption' of window BackupRestore of form syBackupRestore field change script, which seems to compare the build number even after it has determined the version number is greater than SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 (11.0.3339). Of course, the build number for SQL Server 2014 CU4 is 12.0.2430. Since 2430 is not greater than 3339, the script sets the validation flag to false, causing the script to abort with the message indicated above. This problem is exclusive to ...

With the introduction of Dynamics GP 2013 R2, Microsoft delivered support for application database backups onto Windows Azure blob storage service  from within GP itself. Azure Blob storage is a service for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data, that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS. You can use Blob storage to expose data publicly to the world, or to store application data privately. Common uses of Blob storage include: • Serving images or documents directly to a browser • Storing files for distributed access • Streaming video and audio • Performing secure backup and disaster recovery • Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service In turn, Dynamics GP takes advantage of capabilities introduced in SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 to enable SQL Server backup and restore directly to the Windows Azure Blob service. See SQL Server Backup and Restore with Windows Azure Blob Storage Service ...

It has been an exciting ride combing through the features and capabilities of the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 Service Based Architecture components, starting at the core with the new and enhanced .NET interoperability capabilities within Microsoft Dexterity, all the way to the new service base architecture foundation built into Microsoft Dynamics GP to expand the realm of integrations that can be accomplished in today's fast paced, application (Apps) dominated world, whether those applications are native to the Windows platform or cross-platform, whether they reside in the cloud or on premise, and regardless of the form factor. I wanted to provide this single point of reference to reach all entries in the series, which saw 5 articles over the past 5 months. Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 Developer's Preview: Loading the VHD image - Part 1 (Aug 29, 2014) Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 Developer's Preview: Working with Sample URIs - Part 2  (Sep 24, 2014) Microsoft Dynamics GP ...

This week saw the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015, six months after the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R2. Dynamics GP 2015 introduces over 120 new features, all of which have been covered recently over at Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP , the official blog of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management & Marketing teams. This new release also introduces a first round of Service Based Architecture operations, geared toward enhancing the product integration capabilities, and the ability for developers to expand into areas such as mobile applications, cross-platform applications, cloud-based applications and services, among others. At its core, developers will now enjoy the enhanced coding capabilities with the introduction of .NET interop in Microsoft Dexterity, the IDE used to build Dynamics GP. For the IT director or manager, Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 introduces single sign-on capabilities offered via Windows Azure Active Directory, yet reinforcing Microso...

In my previous article (see Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 Developer's Preview: Dexterity Service Patterns - Part 4 ), we discussed the merits of the Wrapped Window pattern and how it can save time by avoiding refactoring of complex business logic embedded on Dexterity forms. I also provided an intro on the Decoupled Logic pattern and why this is the preferred method for exposing Dexterity services as it provides the best performance. However, we also came to the conclusion that refactoring is only feasible in cases where decoupling the business logic from the UI will yield a reasonably increase in performance, without negatively impacting development and product release timelines. We also looked into the Decoupled Logic pattern considerations and today we will accompany these with sample code to clarify the meaning of each. Decoupled Logic Considerations In decoupled logic mode, there is no implicit data types validation or conversion. Unlike the Window Wrapped pattern ...

I take a pause in my Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 Developer's preview series to bring something fun before the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States. Hopefully you find this trick very cool and enjoy it in your workplace. Have you ever wanted to wake up with The Dynamics GP Blogster page as the centerpiece of your Microsoft Dynamics GP application homepage? Or how about your favorite online news outlet? What if you just want to display your company web page or an intranet portal to allow employees to update their information or view the latest company news? Today I will show you how to take advantage of two obscure Dex.ini settings to customize the Connect gadget. The standard Connect gadget displays Microsoft Dynamics Community news and updates, but there are two  Dex.ini keys used to enable runtime debugging of the Connect gadget. One of the Dex.ini  keys turns on the debugging feature and the other allows you to specify a URL to be displayed...

What a week of learning that reIMAGINE 2014 conference was! If you stayed for the post conference training classes, even more power to you. In my previous article (see Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 Developer's Preview: .NET Framework Interoperability - Part 3 ), I talked about the .NET interop capabilities introduced in this iteration of Dexterity and how these new capabilities have become the foundation for unlimited extensibility options for Dexterity-based applications. Today, I wanted to talk about another aspect brought by .NET interop: Dexterity services. However, to understand Dexterity services, we must first take a look at the service implementation patterns. Wrapped Window Pattern Under the wrapped window pattern,  a complete Dexterity form or window logic is wrapped into a service. The goal is to instrument the user interface and leverage all the existing validation logic within a RESTful service as to avoid recreating that same logic s...

November 13, 2014 After a good 3 days of conference sessions (both attending and delivering), I have to say this event has been very special to me. Being able to catch up - yes, catch up! - with old (and not so old) time friends is probably one of the best experiences of this particular reIMAGINE 2014 event. At Hector International Airport (FAR) Gate 1 As I sat at Gate 1 at Hector International Airport, looking out at the snow dusting collected on the tarmac (a stark reminder as to why I don't live in these latitudes), I reflect back on days past to highlight the following: 1. You MUST begin learning about Service-Based Architecture in general, now! The truth is, I spoke to numerous developers during this event and the one question that kept coming up was, " Where do I go to learn all this stuff? ". It took me some time to get acclimated to these style of services, but frankly, you need to build on your past experience. After all the current Web Services mod...

November 12, 2014 As the saying goes, " All good things must come to an end " and it was no different for the reIMAGINE 2014 conference. However, we still had to get through the day with the closing session, and couple breakout sessions we were responsible for. After the fantastic keynote speech by Doug Burgum and some really fun partner hosted events at the local bars on the previous day , it was just natural to wake up with an appetite, so I was down early for breakfast - then again, so was everyone else! Breakfast gathering Breakfast preceded the closing session, which was once more MC'ed by Jesse Byam , who was going around the room asking folks about the highlights of their conference experience, all the while eating their breakfast. Jesse and I had a chance to interact on my own experiences and I have to say, all the Service-Based Architecture sessions I attended were the biggest takeaway for me. After Jesse got the entire room pumped, ...

Oh goodness, what happened last night ? Well, it's true that if you are going to party into the wee hours of the morning, you must still get up to go to the conference and so I did. Today was the first full day of breakout sessions, but David and I won't start our first session until the afternoon. I got up and downloaded  Project Siena for the live demo I would be conducting during our session on building a Windows 8.1 App so I had just a few hours to learn the product. After obtaining the GP service XML configuration file from my buddy Kevin Racer the day before, the idea was to replicate the demo Kevin and Errol conducted on stage during the General Session. David and I met at the Microsoft Campus around 10:30 AM and sat for a bit to go over some of the logistics of the interaction between the two of us during the session. As with all our presentations, the improv factor helps more with having a fun and relaxed time. So David went off to ...