The Dynamics GP Blogster

Over at MBS Guru , my friend Bryan Prince demonstrates a technique to perform in-memory XML serialization when working with eConnect . Bryan's technique is very helpful especially when working in environments where disk access and/or disk permissions can become an issue. If you ever needed a cool piece of code for your eConnect projects, this is it! On a personal note...I had a chance to work on a project briefly with Bryan and I won't be surprised he will be publishing some other cool life saving techniques he used at our client. Until next post! MG.- Mariano Gomez, MVP Maximum Global Business, LLC http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

In recent weeks, the newsgroups have been flooded with questions about the Bing Maps service not working at the street level for addresses in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 - see Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 map buttons not drilling down to the street level . While this issue is slated to be fixed in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Service Pack 2, the bottom line is, it has left a bit of a bad taste in users relying on this functionality. In addition, some users have questioned whether they can use a map service of their choice. There are a few well known services out there, for example Yahoo! Maps , Google Maps , or even some region specific services like Australia's WhereIs.com . The good news is the Microsoft Dynamics GP community is full of individuals who are willing to share their knowledge without any restrictions and my buddy  Jon Eastman at Touchstone Group , a Microsoft partner in the United Kindom offers this Dexterity based solution. The Dexterity solution implem...

Along with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Word Templates came a little known software development kit: Open XML SDK 2.0. Open XML is an open ECMA 376 standard and is also approved as the ISO/IEC 29500 standard that defines a set of XML schemas for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations, and word processing documents. Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010 all use Open XML as the default file format for rendering spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. The Open XML file formats are useful for developers because they use an open standard and are based on well-known technologies: ZIP and XML. The Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office is built on top of the System.IO.Packaging API and provides strongly typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. The SDK also uses the .NET Framework Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) technology to provide strongly typed object access to the XML content inside the parts of Open XML documents. In ...

In my previous article I outlined some of the steps and methods needed on the Visual Studio side to create an integration to Microsoft CRM. In particular, the article showed you how to create the SQL CLR methods and how these methods interact with the Microsoft CRM Web services to create or update an item in the Product entity. Following along, once you have created the assemblies (integration assembly and XML serialization assembly), you must proceed to install these in the Framework directory -- the assemblies were created targeting the .NET Framework 3.5, so they were installed there -- and also register these in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) under the %windir%\assembly folder. Once the assemblies are GAC'ed you can now begin the process of registering these with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008, or 2008 R2. To begin registering the assemblies with SQL Server, we must first define an Asymmetric Key from the signed assembly created in our previous project. USE master; GO CREATE...

Before we get started, there are a few rules: a) I assume you have good working knowledge of both Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft CRM and that you know enough about the Item Master in GP and the Product entity in CRM, b) you are familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio and can create class libraries and create Web references, c) you have done some coding with either VB.NET and/or C#, and d) you will not ask me if I have the same code snippets in VB.NET. As I have said in multiple occassions -- no offense to VB developers -- when I work on commercial grade code I will choose C# over VB.NET any day of the week. A bit of a reminder of the objective of today's code: a) we will create our CLR methods that will serve as bridge to the Microsoft CRM web methods. The resulting assembly will be registered on SQL Server with the CLR methods exposed as stored procedures that can be called from a trigger, and b) we will create the code that will allow us to establish a connection to Microsoft ...

I have been involved for over the past 6 months with an extensive project requiring complex integrations between Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0, Microsoft CRM 4.0 and other custom operational systems. In the process of designing and implementing these integrations the client requested a very easy to use interface that could be maintained without having to hire an army of developers or even specialized resources. The mission: insert/update customer addresses and inventory items from Microsoft Dynamics GP into Microsoft CRM's Product and Customer Address entities. The client also requested the integration be done using the Microsoft CRM web services in order to ensure upgrade support. Background Beginning with SQL Server 2005, the components required to develop basic CLR database objects are installed with SQL Server. CLR integration functionality is exposed in an assembly called system.data.dll , which is part of the .NET Framework. This assembly can be found in the Global Assembly Cach...

I am currently building some customizations for a customer of mine in the aerospace industry. My customer required a library of trigonometric functions that could be used to extend their Dexterity integrating applications. To solve this problem, we turned to .NET to create COM interop assembly. The idea was to take advantage of the standard Math class methods available with the System namespace - System.Math . The following is an excerpt of the code we created: TrigonometricFunctions.cs //Created by Mariano Gomez, MVP using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; namespace TrigonometricFunctions { public class TrigonometricFunctions { [GuidAttribute("8268A95E-6FCB-4FB2-88A1-1E38F49F4FB8"), ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.AutoDual)] public class TrigFn { // dx in degrees public double fSin(double dx) { double angle = Math.PI * dx / 1...

Background Just recently, I came across a Microsoft Dynamics GP Partners forum question, requesting the ability to add the amount in words to the SOP Entry window and possibly other windows throughout the system. Certain requirements may seem very strange to some of us, but are based on actual customer requests elsewhere on this planet. The proposed solution As I have been lately talking about hybrid integrating applications development , I thought it would be more than appropriate for this occassion to show how this customization could be achieved with the use of Modifier and Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP . The idea? Pretty simple! Add a text field to the SOP Entry window with Modifier, then build a forms dictionary application assembly with the Dictionary Assembly Generator that can be accessed from Visual Studio Tools. In Visual Studio, I would then create a Dynamics GP project that would reference the Application.Dynamics.ModifiedForms.dll to set the document am...

For those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter , you probably already got first hand updates as I was going through rebuilding my laptop with the new Windows 7 and getting all my core applications installed. Most of you are aware that I am more of a technical guy, so hardware and applications performance is very critical. Let's start with my laptop... I currently own a Dell XPS M1710 running Intel Centrino Duo core and 2.5GB in RAM. I know, yes! I use a gaming notebook taking advantage of the processing capabilities and the massive 17" screen. A little outdated when compared to the new XPS, but it still gets the job done! The goal was to install the following software: Windows 7 Enterprise Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, including Microsoft Project 2007 and Microsoft Visio 2007 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard with Service Pack 1 Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard with Service Pack 1 Microsoft Dexterity 10 with Service Pack 4 Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 with Servi...

Starting today, I will introduce a weekly series dedicated to explore other Microsoft technologies that may seem totally unrelated to Dynamics GP. These articles are based on experiences acquired through pet projects. These are projects that have not made it beyond my computing lab and have become a true passion of mine. My intention is to present them to you the reader with only one goal in mind: show how the use of technology can enhance user interaction with data . The articles will present practical samples of these technologies and how they could perhaps be incorporated into your Dynamics GP development efforts. Part I: The Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Interface Today we will explore Silverlight and Microsoft Virtual Earth . Silverlight was originally introduced as a video streaming plug in, but has rapidly evolved into a feature-rich interactive web applications development framework. In turn, Microsoft Virtual Earth, now Bing Maps for Enterprise, is a set of controls and APIs ...