In this small article we would like to review the way to revise and redeploy legacy Microsoft Dexterity customization, which is probably still in production mode in your company. Former Great Plains Software Dynamics and eEnterprise product lines were under extensive tailoring to fit business processes back in 1990th. Now it is time to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0 and redesign custom logic
o eConnect. This tool and connector allows you to manipulate: create, modify, delete and change GP objects, such as Customer, SOP Invoice, Purchase Order, Employee, etc.
o Extender. This tool allows you to create new GP screens and tables and associate them with GP native screens, such as Customer maintenance
o Microsoft Visual Studio. When you deploy eConnect and custom tables, created by Extender, you may consider create DLL project in Visual Studio.Net to add business logic
o Dexterity retro. Great Plains Dexterity allows you to create screens, which will be integrated into Microsoft Dynamics GP workstation (and specific GP user) security realm. In this case you can call DLL procedures, created in MS VS as suggested above directly from Microsoft Dynamics GP Dexterity sancscript scripts in either GP alternate or new dexterity form
o Dexterity relicts. There are Dex legacy techniques, that needs to migrated to new technologies. One of these dinosaurs is dexterity cursors. You will see that they are really slow bottlenecks if your custom logic requires huge data processing. This is similar to cursors in Microsoft transact SQL – it is a way slow comparing to aggregated select statement. Historically dex cursors enabled multi-platform DB support: ctree, faircom/btrieve/Pervasive SQL and MS SQL Server 6.5/7.0. When Microsoft Business Solutions was formed on the base of former GPS – Microsoft decided to concentrate on MS SQL Server platform only.
