Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Great Plains – Renaissance of GP Dexterity

In this small article we would like to give you historical excurse and emphasize our opinion on Great Plains Dexterity renaissance, including GP dex source code programming, dex sanscript legacy customizations upgrade without the fearing of the future dex phasing out.  Of course we can not guarantee you the future, as we are not Microsoft corporation, however chances are high that Microsoft Dynamics GP is getting back to its legacy roots

1. GP development tools.  There are several tools available for Visual Studio, Dexterity and VBA programmers: Microsoft Dexterity, eConnect, VBA with Modifier (this option is very strange for GP 10.0 as it is known fact that for version 9.0 MBS discouraged GP community to use VBA scripting with Modifier).  If you are C# or VB.Net developer you should consider SDK, allowing your to deploy XML Web Services and eConnect, plus Dexterity COM technologies to extend GP workstation interface
2. eConnect – isn’t too modest move?  As being enlightened by Microsoft Project Green, we expected that somewhere by 2005 Microsoft Great Plains would be integrated with Microsoft manufacturing (Navision ?) and Project (Solomon ?) suites.  This in turn should result in GP being rewritten in C# .Net code.  Well, the expectations probably have to be checked by the market itself.  As we see so far, Microsoft Dynamics AX Axapta is progressing with X++ and MorphX, Navision C Side, so does GP – Dexterity gets integrated with new Microsoft Windows features, such as COM, XML Web Services
3. Dexterity Cursors Dilemma.  If your Dex customization roots in late 1990th, you probably have data base independent Dexterity cursors.  When Microsoft purchased Great Plains Software, Microsoft abandoned all the others DB platform, but MS SQL Server/MSDN: Pervasive SQL 2000/Btrieve and Ctree.   Dexterity cursors are using Dex super indexes, and doing so this construction is a bit slow and obsolete, considering MS SQL Server native origin for GP newest versions: 8.0, 9.0 and 10.0.  We recommend you to consider disassembling dex cursors to SQL Server stored procedures and scripts
4. Dynamics.dic.  If you have dex customization, this is where your custom code is sitting.  In some cases NBS partner will give you extract.dic
5. Reporting Tools.  ReportWriter is pure Dexterity module with all the restrictions of Dexterity, especially on indexes and cross modules data pulling.  If you need more flexible reporting tool, consider SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS ) , or even older industry standard – Crystal Reports
6. Generic ODBC DB connection.  If you are comfortable with ODBC – you should review GP tables structure and this would open Visual Studio ADO connection to GP databases, the programming language of choice is your decision