Microsoft Dexterity Programming Challenges

In this small article we will try to orient you in how you should consider your current Microsoft Dexterity modification upgrade, what are dex pluses and minuses from contemporary programmer standpoint:

• OOP or object oriented programming.  If you look back to programming concept developing in 1980th and earlier 1990th – you will find that those days procedural programming as prevailing and object oriented programming was already invented but not yet implemented into “mass production”.  Dexterity is rather procedural scripting language, which was written in C programming language in its turn.  Later on in late 1990th GPS tried to switch dex to OOP, when Great Plains decided to develop from scratch its own Purchase Order module (and not to purchase and incorporate Intellisol Advanced Purchase Order Processing/Project Accounting), however it was rather too complicated and later on the idea lost its support
• Dexterity vs eConnect programming balancing.  eConnect has certain level of OOP, however it has to deal with Dexterity restrictions on the database level (dex primary keys, DEX_ROW_ID columns, etc). eConnect also lacks posting functionality – and this is understandable – GP design leaves batches posting to be in GP operator hands
• Extender from eOne.  This is another nice module, where you can abstract yourself from dex and at the same time introduce new functionality in GP.  However if you plan to bring “life” to your new custom screens – you should consider doing so via Dex sanscripts, attached to your Extender project.  In other words – you are back in the realm of Dexterity – either you use Dex IDE or Extender – the programming duty is still there
• Integration.  In our opinion dex is slowly abandoning the scene of GP integrations, leaving the way to eConnect and earlier it was giving it up to pure SQL stored procedures
• Reporting.  Great Plains ReportWriter is pure dex application and it has real problems to provide flexibility to GP reporting.  This is why we see the help from Crystal Reports (was recommended up to GP version 8.0) and later on MS SQL Server Reporting Services