Developing for Dynamics GP

Microsoft Dynamics GP Testing 101 Session

David Musgrave — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

After spending a great week with attendees at the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 in Fargo, I decided to try my hand at contributing to the Developing for Dynamics GP blog. I am a Test Engineer on the GP team focusing on Dexterity and as such I had the pleasure to present a Dynamics GP Testing 101 session at the Conference with my teammate Grant Swenson. So today I wanted to highlight the key takeaways from the session as well as provide links to a couple of great reference materials that are available today.

First off, when thinking about how to approach creating a test environment for your solution, take some time to identify the areas you need to test in and the starting point that can provide a good foundation for your tests. Do you need a large set of starting data or will a smaller subset do? On the environmental side, are there integrating applications, printers or things like specific date, time or currency formatting you need to utilize in your solution? Once you have identified these things, determine how you will get your system back to this starting point after testing has been done. That may mean taking database backups to restore later or using BCP to pull the data out, etc. Whatever that method is, the first critical part in starting the testing process is figuring out how to replicate and return to your starting point. If there was one piece of information for attendees at the presentation to take away it is that consistency is key. Replicating the same environment you first created tests in to rerun them and verify the results can give you a big boost towards success and make things like troubleshooting errors much, much easier to do.

Secondly, there are all sorts of tips for creating Dexterity macros or doing things like SRS testing. The main thing to remember here is that you want to start off taking small steps. Don’t try to cover every scenario and have all the data you possibly can be recorded or sent out to an output file. This gets to be quite a chore to verify and most times will leave you frustrated with the whole process. By approaching a small piece of your solution, figuring out the data you will need for that piece and then recording a macro to test that part, can oftentimes be the best way to start. It can also help you to provide some very useful feedback to the rest of the development team much sooner on the quality of a feature or product.

For those who are looking into bringing automated tests into their development environments, there are two released resources available today that can help paint the full picture of the considerations to take and how to start when recording macros for your Dexterity solutions. The first is in the Dexterity documentation. The document to look at is called the Programmer’s Guide Volume 2 and more specifically in Chapter 34: Testing Your Application. Now, if you aren’t a developer don’t be scared away by the word "Programmer’s" in the title. This is a great all around resource that describes the Dexterity macro system that can be used for business logic automation or for testing so be sure to check it out. The second resource that really pulls all the pieces together for you when starting down the automation path is the whitepaper called, "Recording Test Cases with the Macro System" (also attached). This is found on the Microsoft site and walks through the importance of creating a starting point, how to get started with macros and helpful .ini settings as well as what to do after you have created your first macros.

Check these two resources out and see if you can take the first or next step into bringing some automation into your development organization. There are numerous benefits including increasing the overall chances of having successful deployments at your site or your customer sites as well as lowering the overall cost of a project by finding defects in the solution before it goes the door. At the conference we also previewed a test automation framework sample. Stay tuned for more information to come on that once we find a good home for it to be shared with you!

Have a great day and happy testing!

Alice

Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up

David Musgrave — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

So the conference is over and in my opinion it was a great success. I would like to thank all the team members involved at all levels for putting on a great event and making everyone feel so welcome. The friendly atmosphere is one of the reasons I really enjoy going to Fargo (in spite of the extremely long travel times).

Below are the links for all the Conference posts by myself and some of the other bloggers in the community:

From this blog by David Musgrave

From the Dynamics GP Blogster by Mariano Gomez

From Inside Dynamics GP by Andy Westby

Live from Fargo…

From the Edge by Gerice Anderson

Microsoft Dynamics GP Developers Stampede to Fargo

Hope you enjoy the coverage of the conference.

Please post your comments and feedback on the event and let us know your thoughts.

David

Coming home from the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009

David Musgrave — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

This is the final diary style post on my trip to the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009. Hopefully you have enjoyed reading about the events of the trip. As far as I am concerned it was a great success. The conference, my sessions, the meetings and the socialising with partners and Microsoft staff all added up to make a fantastic but tiring trip.

I started my journey at 11:30 when I checked out and left the Ramada hotel. My first flight left Fargo at 13:00 arrived an hour later in Minneapolis/St Paul. I wanted to organise my seats of the two Qantas flights and so was looking for a WiFi connection I could use. Sadly, there was no free connections available. I decided to browse through a gadget shop (OK, I admit it... I like cool gadgets). While there a gentleman asked about Australian power plug adapters and I ended up chatting with him. It turned out that Brian was heading over to Sydney for a work meeting in the Hunter Valley (a great wine region). When he found out that I wanted to get an internet connection, he took me to the Delta/Northwest lounge as a guest. Once he had got me into the lounge and told me how to get onto their WiFi, he left for his flight. Thank-you Brian for your help, which allowed me to get the blog updated.

My flight from Minneapolis left at 17:00 and was uneventful, arriving 4 hours later in Los Angeles at 19:00. I spent a couple of hours in the One World lounge (working this post). The long haul (15 hours) flight left Los Angeles at 22:30 on Saturday night and arrived in Sydney at 08:30 Monday morning. As we crossed the international date line, Sunday will just disappear during the flight.

This is the bit that I hate. After being away from home for a period of time, I am finally back in Australia, but I am still a five hour flight away from Perth. While in Sydney Airport, I met a couple of other Microsoft guys who were heading from Redmond (Seattle) to Hobart in Tasmania. I helped get them into the Qantas lounge so they could get internet access and refreshments before their connecting flight. After just under an hour waiting, I left Sydney at 10:00 and arrived in Perth 5.5 hours later at 12:30. A half hour taxi ride from the airport and I am finally home after 36 hours on the move.

I think I will sleep for the rest of the day!!! After I surprise my youngest, Rohan, by picking him up from school.

David

17-Nov-2009: Rohan was happy to see me. Also, I did not get to sleep early in the end and am still tired.

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Meetings after the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009

David Musgrave — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

If you are going to spend a day and a half getting somewhere and a day and a half going home, you want to spend more than two or three days at your destination.

My trip to Fargo included the days for the conference, but also one day before and two days afterward in the Microsoft office. The additional days were spent filled up with meetings relating to my role as Escalation Engineer on the Asia Pacific (APAC) support team for Microsoft Dynamics GP. Yes, I do actually have a job to do beyond responding on forums and newsgroups and writing blog articles.

I won't bore you with details, but I will say that all the meetings went really well. A couple of the meetings were related to my pet projects of the Support Debugging Tool and Menus for Visual Studio Tools. At these two meetings I outlined my plans for the releases of these tools and got approval for those plans. You will see these releases as soon as I can complete the development, testing and documentation work needed. I will post the details when they are released.

One of the saddest parts of the day was saying goodbye to Mariano when the time came for him to head out to the airport and start his journey to Atlanta, Georgia. It has been a wonderful experience working with him over the last 18 months online and now in person. I look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with him. Hopefully, you will see us presenting again soon.

Saying goodbye to Mariano

After the meetings on Thursday, I went to Granite City bar and grill for dinner with some of Scott Stephenson's team (Developer Support and Escalation Engineers) and brought out the Arnott's Tim Tams chocolate biscuits again. A number of the team tried the Tim Tam Slam (see previous post for details) and enjoyed the very yummy but potentially messy experience.

Scott Stephenson being a great sport and doing the Tim Tam Slam

On Friday, I demonstrated the Support Debugging Tool twice to some of the internal support teams with the aim of driving adoption and use of the tool by the Microsoft Dynamics GP support teams.

For dinner on Friday, I caught up with ex-Microsoftie, Sheila Ochoa and her family. She invited her friend Debbie Larson, who works at Microsoft and originally comes from the UK. We spent some time re-living the past and comparing notes and listening to English music from the 1980's. Believe it or not, she comes from the same part of London that I lived in before I came to Australia and knew the school that I went to as a child. Sometimes it is amazing how small the world can be.

David

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Duplicate key error on a range copy statement

Patrick Roth [MSFT] — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:00:00 GMT

An ISV ran across an interesting problem a few days ago in his Dexterity/Dynamics 9.0 solution.

The goal of a particular procedure was to copy records from one table into a nearly identical duplicate temporary table. The duplicate table contained all of the original table fields plus a few new ones. The temp table was created by using the Duplicate feature in Dexterity so the keys of the new table were identical to the original table.

The ISV code was using was essentially:

Dexterity Code range copy table MyTable to table MyTableTemp; check error; {check error for debugging purposes} warning str(err()); {for debugging purposes}

You would expect that this would work fine however what what we found that no records were copied and the error message given on the check error statement was:

A range copy statement on table MyTable has created a duplicate key.

The err() function returned 17 - DUPLICATE which was consistent with the check error statement.

Puzzling. I admit that my first instinct was that there WAS a duplicate being generated. I've seen that a number of times and have done it myself once or twice. Take a table and range copy it into another table that has different (unique) keys and depending on your data this will work OK sometimes and sometimes not.

But why don't the non-duplicates get inserted? The reason you don't end up with any data is because SQL rolls back the records on the insertion failure and so you don't get any records in the target table.

So why isn't this the solution? Because the ISV duplicated the original table meaning the original keys were duplicated as well (and he assured me he didn't add any new ones) and so if the original table allowed the data the duplicate should also.

But yet we apparently were getting a duplicate created.

After determining that there wasn't a code issue and the table definitions were all OK, the next step was to turn on the SQL Server Profiler to see what SQL was complaining about.

To test this, I duplicated the RM_Customer_MSTR table and added the Vendor ID field to the end of the table. I also set the physical name of the table to "temp" to make sure my test was the same as the ISV's.

The Dexterity statement used and the SQL Statement generated by the range copy operation is shown below. I removed mosf of the columns since you don't need to see them all to see the issue.

Dexterity Code and SQL Trace results

range copy table RM_Customer_MSTR to table RM_Customer_MSTR_Temp;
INSERT INTO ##2033653 (CUSTNMBR, CUSTNAME, CUSTCLAS, <removed>, INCLUDEINDP) 
  SELECT CUSTNMBR, CUSTNAME, CUSTCLAS, <removed>, INCLUDEINDP FROM TWO.dbo.RM00101 
 

The one thing I noticed is that the VENDORID is not included in the insert/select statement generated. So in that case, on a SQL insert where a column is ignored then SQL fills it with the bound default (if available) or null if not. Well, this is a temp table so there is NOT a bound default and so the column should be getting a null which isn't allowed by the constraints that Dexterity puts on table columns during table generation.

So where is the duplicate? There isn't one.

Turning on the Error Messages in our SQL Profiler during our range copy statement, SQL tells us the actual issue which is what I was thinking it to be after verifying the table keys.

Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'VENDORID', table 'tempdb.dbo.##2033653; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.

Well that explains it. The new columns are ignored and get the column default which is null. Nulls are not allowed and so it fails with no inserts.

In this case, the Dexterity error message given is completely incorrect and misleading - one of the very few times I can think of that has been the case.

There are several solutions that I can think of depending on circumstances.

If this wasn't a temp table and instead a permanent table, then you can make sure that your columns are bound to the appropriate defaults. So in this case, the binding constant for the VENDORID column is GPS_CHAR. Since the column has a legal default this would just work.
Loop through the original table in a while statement and copy the records one by one to the target table. This will work because Dexterity will supply the default for the new columns. Of course this is slow since these are single inserts in a loop. Very inefficient but it would work.
Use pass through SQL and write the correct code yourself. In this case, I added the VENDORID column to the list of column fields in the target table and set the default to be an empty string (which is not NULL). This was the solution we employed for the ISV.

INSERT INTO ##2033653 (CUSTNMBR, CUSTNAME, CUSTCLAS, <removed>, INCLUDEINDP, VENDORID)
SELECT CUSTNMBR, CUSTNAME, CUSTCLAS, <removed>, INCLUDEINDP,'' FROM TWO.dbo.RM00101
Upgrade to 10.0. The range copy statement was enhanced for 10.0 to handle the new columns in the target table. In this case, Dexterity would generate the SQL statement from #3 above and the range copy operation would work successfully.

So the next time you are using Dexterity to perform a range copy operation, think about your keys on the target table to make sure that you couldn't get a legitimate duplicate. And if you are 9.0 and have new columns in the target table, consider using methods #2 or #3 above instead of a straight range copy statement.

Best regards,

Patrick
Developer Support

Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 - Day 2

David Musgrave — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

After staying up until the early hours of the morning, it was hard to get up again. I met Leslie, Mariano and Jaydel Gluckie from Horizons International for breakfast and then we headed over to the Microsoft Fargo campus. The Fargo campus is now the largest Microsoft campus outside of the Redmond campus.

We went back to our meeting room, finished making the changes we had worked out last night and printed out our notes. We were finally all ready for the second session. I think that next time I present at a conference with a co-presenter, I will organise to get to the location earlier and have another couple of days before hand to fine tune everything .... in person.

The presentation of "Troubleshooting Your Developed Solution" went well. It was not quite as crowded as the Customizing session, but the attendees liked what they saw. In the session we went through some theory of software development and testing before covering the tools available to you to troubleshoot issues in the different development environments. We sped through the presentation (on purpose) so we could spend most of the session running through a demonstration of the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

After the session, Mariano, Leslie and I reviewed the demonstration and discussed how we can tweak a couple of sections. After lunch, we presented the Troubleshooting session again and the repeated session was even better than the original. I must say that Mariano had none of the concerns of the day before, he is a seasoned professional now.

I want to really thank Leslie, who gave Mariano and I her time and fantastic knowledge to make this session awesome. She attended the session both times it was run and helped us keep on time so that we finished within the 75 minutes we had for each session. If you were there and enjoyed the session, please know that it was a combined effort from Mariano and myself as well as Leslie.

Next time, I will request for the Support Debugging Tool to have a session of its own as it definitely has enough in it to fill a session by itself. We can then give the session a more accurate title, so attendees know what they will be seeing. This will also allow us to spend more time on the troubleshooting methods with the development tools and we can do some demonstrations of how to solve various issues. Maybe next conference there will be three sessions.... Customizing, Troubleshooting and the Support Debugging Tool.

As we finished our final concurrent session, the rooms were prepared for the closing session. I managed to get hold of my friend Jeff Trosen long enough to get a photo. Here he is with Babs Coler who organised the conference.... Thanks Babs for a great event.

Left to Right: Jeff Trosen, Me (again) and Babs Coler

The closing session included a Questions and Answers (Q&A) section which started off by Mark Rockwell (Rockton Software) and of course Bill Marshall (MC²). The Q&A session was MC'd by Dave Coulombe and had a panel representing all the different areas of Microsoft Dynamics GP organisation. We also had an fantastic presentation by John Hancock on the new Microsoft Power Pivot tool for extremely fast Business Intelligence analysis.

Left to Right: Jeff Trosen, Chad Sogge, Gary Tronson, Scott Stephenson and Errol Schoenfish

After the closing session we had one last Study Hall session... read as ... time to socialize with the partner attendees and the Microsoft staff. Not surprisingly, I ended up with the Dexterity development and support teams.

Left to Right: Dave Dusek, Patrick Roth, Erik Nissen, Alice Newsam, Rob Anderson & Brian Roney

After conference finished, Mariano and I had been invited to a small gathering with the Product Management team at Errol and Cheri Schoenfish's house. I brought some Arnott's Tim Tams chocolate biscuits with me from Australia and challenged everyone to try the Tim Tam Slam. This is where you bite off both ends and use the Tim Tam as a straw to suck up a hot drink. You need to put the Tim Tam in your mouth as soon as the hot drink touches your tongue as the biscuit will disintegrate very fast.

Errol Schoenfish doing the Tim Tam Slam (thanks for letting me post this)

The conference was over and everything was a great success. But my trip was not over yet.

David

17-Nov-2009: Materials for the Troubleshooting session are attached to the bottom of this post.

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 - Day 1

David Musgrave — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Wow, what a ride!!

I will apologize that this update has taken until now to post, but writing blog posts requires time and that is the one thing that has been at a premium over the last few days.

On Tuesday, I arrive on the first full day at the conference to hear someone call out my name..... someone who still has an Australian accent. I turn around to find none other than Geoff Harding. Former work colleague from Sequel Technology who now lives in the USA and works for Wennsoft. Geoff wrote the Equipment Series while at Sequel Technology, he even let me write a few sections of code. It was great to see Geoff again as I only see him now at Microsoft Dynamics GP conferences. I had brought some Vegemite with me from home to give as a gift and so who better to receive it than a fellow Aussie.

Geoff Harding (tall one) and David Musgrave (short one)

The Conference started with opening session with Dave Coulombe, Errol Schoenfish and Jeff Trosen welcoming us to Fargo. During the session, Martin Olsen and Chris Dew from eOne Business Solutions demonstrated some of the new "Forms" functionality that was added to the Extender product for v10.0 Service Pack 4 and later. They created a great example on-the-fly of a system to track professors, classes and students. For some reason, they enjoyed picking on me by using my name in their demo data and setting me as a junior level trainer using the lowest hourly rate. Errol also showed a great video which attempts to explain why 11 is better than 10.

After the opening session came the first concurrent session time slot. There were two sessions offered for each time slot and one of these first sessions was Mariano and my "Customizing the Microsoft Dynamics GP Client with Visual Studio Tools, Dexterity and Modifier with VBA" session. As we are getting ready for the session, setting up the machines and getting the microphones put on, Mariano is looking more and more uncomfortable. I knew that this was his first time presenting to a large public audience, and understood that he would be nervous. While he got me worried, after a quick break to get some fresh air he was ready to go. I had faith in him and it was well rewarded. The session was standing room only and was a great success. We went through eight demos showing how to use four different tools in two ways to achieve similar customisations. He was a lot more relaxed after the session.

Mariano (looking more relaxed) and David

After our session, we attended the Rob Anderson's "What's New in Dexterity for Microsoft Dynamics GP 11?" session which showed us some of the cool things coming in the next set of the tools. Here are a couple of them: Context menus in Dexterity and Table buffer parameters for Visual Studio Tools. We also attended Rob Wagner's "Emailing Documents and Word Templates" session, which showed us how the new Word forms functionality works when printing documents such as SOP Invoices.

After the three concurrent sessions there was an ISV Expo and Reception. Mariano, Leslie Vail and I stayed for a little bit and then went to a meeting room to prepare for our Troubleshooting session the next day. In particular we were working on demonstration of the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP. We made good progress but were not finished when we ran out of time and went back to the conference to participate in the Study Hall sessions.

While there I was able to catch up Dave Coulombe, who I have known since I first started with GP in 1994.

Dave Coulombe and David Musgrave

I was also able to meet and greet with a number of partners, Microsoft staff and long time friends.

Left to Right: Emily Roen, Leslie Vail, David Musgrave, Constance Gilleland, Denni Conner

At the end of the Study Hall time (9pm), we (Mariano, Leslie and I) caught the bus back to the Ramada hotel and found a table in the Basies restaurant that had a power socket. We sat down with some drinks and snacks to eat and continued to work on the demonstration for tomorrow's session. By the time we finished, it was 1:30am and we were all exhausted.

I must thank Mariano and Leslie for spending the time working through the ideas I had to streamline them, improve them and make them work smoothly.

We were finally ready for the session, just need to update the document with the handwritten notes and print the cheat sheets out.

By the time I got to sleep, I had four hours before I had to get up again.

David

17-Nov-2009: Materials for the Customizing session are attached to the bottom of this post.

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 - Day 0

David Musgrave — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Today is Monday and was the last chance for Mariano and I to prepare our sessions for the conference. We had a room on the Microsoft Fargo campus set aside for our use for the day. This is the first time I have been on campus since I was in town for the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Airlift 2008 and so the first time I have seen the new Vision and Commons buildings.

New buildings on the Microsoft campus in Fargo: Vision (left) and Commons (middle)

We spent the day trying to do a "dry run" of our presentations, but once we fitted in saying hello to many of the Microsoft team members who wanted to catch up with us, a couple of meetings, lunch at the amazing new cafeteria in the Commons and doing a technical test of our laptops with the project, we had not done much more than go over the introduction slides.

Near the end of the day, we finally got some time to sit down and work through one of the planned demos and were hit with a big realisation. Unless we had 3 hours for our Customisation session, there was no way we would be able to get through the demos by actually coding them during the session. So we had to re-think our plans (more on that in the next post).

Then it was time to go conference registration and welcome session and dinner. This was held in the Commons dinning area. On a number of the tables Lego Bionicle and Kennex sets had been provided to keep the attendees amused. Leslie Vail decided to construct a Ferris Wheel kit and with a "little" help from Darren Hunt created a working engineering masterpiece. Leslie even borrowed the batteries from her mouse to make the motor work.

Amateur Engineers: Darren Hunt and Leslie Vail

At the registration dinner, Mariano and I also had the chance to catch up with fellow bloggers Michael Johnson (The MBS Guru) and Constance Gilleland.

Left to right: Michael Johnson, Mariano Gomez, David Musgrave, Constance Gilleland

Make sure you check out Mariano's post on the day which also includes some great photos of the new buildings (both exterior and interior).

Conference starts tomorrow. Hopefully we are ready.

David

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

A relaxing day before the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009

David Musgrave — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Just after I hit the publish button on the previous post about my trip, I received a call that some friends were waiting in the lobby for me. So I finished getting ready and went down to catch up with Mariano Gomez (The Dynamics GP Blogster) and Leslie Vail (The Dynamics Confessor).

I spent the next few hours chatting with Mariano and Leslie while walking around West Acres Mall taking advantage of the good exchange rate and trying to fill the previously mentioned bag. While at the mall, we were joined by Richard Whaley (Accolade Publications). The shopping trip was successful and also a lot of fun catching up with friends.

We organised to meet for dinner with all the GP people we knew were at the Ramada. We were joined by Mark Rockwell (Rockton Software) and Darren Hunt (IBG). Being lazy, we stayed in the hotel at the Basies Restaurant and had a meal with great food and great company.

From left to right: Mariano, Mark, Leslie, Richard, David & Darren

So after a relaxing day acclimatising to Fargo (time zone and weather), I am ready for tomorrow.

David

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Getting to the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Part 2

David Musgrave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Following on from Getting to the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Part 1.

I have an uneventful four and a bit hour flight from Perth to Sydney, arriving at 13:00 (Sydney time). I then transfer by airport coach from the domestic terminal to the international terminal where I go through passport control and security again. Once through security, you have to wind your way through a huge duty free shop to get into the main part of the terminal. I did go and look at the cameras but resisted the temptation to upgrade... for now. I wonder how many people "impulse buy" because of the way you are forced to walk through the shop.

After a short walk around the various shops, I went up to the Qantas lounge. -- A quick bit of trivia: Qantas is one of the only words in English to have the letter Q not followed by a U. This is because it is not really a word, but an acronym for Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services. If you want to know more, look at their website. -- At the lounge, I was told that my seat had been changed to an exit row. While this means lots of legroom (something I don't really need), it also means that you don't have a seat pocket in front of you to put your stuff in. However, it was also a premium economy seat, so I "no complain".

I settled into the lounge for a bit, keeping an eye on my watch, when my phone wakes up to tell me the plane leaves (not boards) in 30 minutes. I realised that I had adjusted my watch by 2 hours for Sydney rather than 3 hours to include daylight saving. I knew there was a reason that Western Australia voted against having daylight saving for the fourth time in a recent referendum. So a short but quick walk down to the gate and I catch the tail end of the boarding. On the plus side, I was able to bypass the additional security check where they literally empty your bag. My backpack weighs about 14kg and has my laptop and netbook in it as well as a heap of gadgets (inc. spare battery, power supplies, etc.). I get aboard and settle in for the 13 hour flight across the Pacific to Los Angeles arriving at about 10:00 (LA time).

In LA, I get both hands finger-printed and a mug shot taken accompanied by a short but pleasant interrogation and then I am allowed into the US. I get my bag and go through customs and give my bag back so it can hopefully make the domestic flights to meet me in Fargo. A "short" walk from Terminal 1 to Terminal 5 gets me to where Northwest operate from. Once inside the terminal, I unsuccessfully, spend a some time looking for a Northwest sign, I could only see Delta. Eventually, I ask an official to find out that Northwest is now part of Delta. So I get my boarding pass from one of the automated touch screen systems and head through security... yet again.

The flight to Minneapolis/St Paul was delayed departing LA because the incoming flight was late. I wonder if the pilots were chatting. I board the flight and have a pleasant 3.5 hour trip talking to a student called Brian who is originally from New York, but studying at Purdue University in Indiana. He had just spent some time at a conference in Beijing in China. We arrive 45 minutes late at 18:35 (MSP time) in the twin cities to have people running to make connections. Brian had about 10 minutes to get to his gate, but they were holding the flight. A brisk walk to my gate which was miles away and I board my flight to Fargo.

As I walk down to my seat, I said hello to Andrew Ingalls (ex Dexterity Guru, now working with Dynamics AX) sitting in the big seats at the front. I plan to say hello again once the seat belt sign goes off, but fell asleep for most of the flight. I think I will catch him again when we disembark but he must not have had checked bags and was gone. Oh well, I will say Hi again in the office.

Anyhow, after 35 minutes in the air, we arrived in Fargo on time at 20:30. I go to pick up my bag and dutifully wait until the luggage carousel is turned off and everyone else has their bag. Somewhere between LA and Fargo, my bag went AWOL. I had a tight connection in Minneapolis, so maybe it did not make it in time. So, I go and have a chat with the guy at the counter and get on the hotel shuttle (thanks for waiting).

I check in to the Ramada at 21:00, have a lovely meal (Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken), write the first half of this blog post and go to bed. ..... I get a phone call at 11:00 on Sunday, my bag is at the airport and by 12:00 we are re-united.

Yippee, I am in Fargo and so is my bag. It only took me 31 hours door to door. It took my bag a little longer.

See you at the conference.

David

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Getting to the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Part 1

David Musgrave — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I always said I would not use the blog to keep a diary. But I am going to make an exception as I keep you up to date with my trip to Fargo, North Dakota, USA for the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009.

I will skip passed the effort involved to get everything ready for the conference and start with the packing. No, I will not tell you how many pairs of socks I packed. Just about an ongoing philosophical discussion (read argument) that my wife and I have about packing. Jennifer likes to pack a full bag, this stops things moving around and protects the more fragile objects better. So when she helps me pack (which is most times I travel), she always tries to use the smallest bag that will fit what has been selected to take. I like to take a bigger bag, so that when it is time to come home, you don't have to struggle to get your original contents, as well as any purchases you might have made, to fit in the bag. This time I won. ... Well, West Acres Mall is across the road from the Ramada and the Australian Dollar is very strong against the US Dollar at the moment.

Now, comes the trip. I live in Perth, Western Australia. I think this is the furthest capital city away from Fargo that you can find while staying on the planet. It is 14 hours ahead of Fargo (13 hours when DST is active in North Dakota), and is in the southern hemisphere. Most other Australians who come to Fargo live on the East coast (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, etc.). This means that they don't have far to travel to get to Sydney Airport to fly to the USA (usually Los Angeles). Because I live in Perth, I start with a long flight across Australia to get to Sydney.

So, I get up at 03:00 Saturday morning (Perth time), get ready and wait for the taxi booked at 04:00. I try not to wake the family, but Jennifer comes outside to wait with me. At 04:15, I called the taxi company, to be told that "their systems were down and they were working on it. Call again in 10 minutes if the taxi has not yet arrived.". At 04:25, Jennifer decides to get dressed and wake the kids, she is going to drive me to the airport. I had added a safety margin when booking the taxi, but that was rapidly disappearing. We left home at 04:35 and made the half hour trip to the airport. On the way, I tried a couple of times to speak to the taxi company to tell them to cancel my booking, but gave up waiting on hold. They must have been too busy handling complaints.

At the airport, the queues had built up because lots of people were running late due Perth's biggest taxi company being offline. I was worried that all the good seats would be gone, but my seat allocation selected the night before via on-line check-in had stuck. I did not think it had worked as the on-line system failed on the final step. I get through security with about five minutes to spare before boarding is called.

Finally at 05:45, I am on the way.... to be continued.

David

18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.

Blog lunch table topic during GP Technical Conference 2009

Patrick Roth [MSFT] — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 GMT

I'm sure we would have double the attendees if I'd have gotten around to getting this blog post out earlier. But there is still time to get your Technical Conference 2009 registration done, last minute travel plans booked, and hotel reservations made.

I wanted to let the people on the blog know that there will be various round table discussions on Nov 10 and Nov 11 around the lunch hour. I'm not sure of all the topics - there will be a list I suspect - but one of the round table discussions will be on the Developing for Dynamics GP blog. Yours truly will be the host. Perhaps David Musgrave might stop by as well depending on his schedule - he's a popular guy.

What will we talk about? We can talk about the new building, the nice November weather we are having (beautiful now that is has stopped raining), and maybe squeeze in a few thoughts on the blog. This will allow us to get your thoughts on:

How the blog is doing?
Are the articles relevant?
How does it look visually? Too much stuff on the main page?
What topics should we have more of? Less?
Is this stuff all obvious? Or too complex? Or just right?
Frequency of postings - too much? (Don't say not enough!)
Anything else you care to comment on.

We were not given any kind of indication of location, number of seats, etc so we'll have to see how it all works out when the day comes.

Hope to see you there.

Regards,
Patrick

Don't miss the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009

David Musgrave — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I have spent the last month or so working hard with Mariano Gomez on the preparation of materials and demos for the sessions we will be presenting at the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009.

Time is running out to get registered and organise your transport and accommodation. See the top ten reasons to attend below:

Top Ten Reasons to attend the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009

Looking forward to seeing you.

David

Automating or Customizing the Report Destination Window

David Musgrave — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I have seen this issue come up a number of times. Trying to automate processes which involve reports and wanting to automate the Report Destination window. Sometimes you can add the Report Destination to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and sometimes the system will not add the window to VBA. This post will explain the reason for this "weird" behavior.

One thing about "weird" behavior when it comes to computers, is that once the explanation has been discovered, it all makes perfect sense and the computer is just being logical.

The primary fact for this issue is that there are actually two different Report Destination windows:

In the Dex.dic. This Report Destination window is part of the runtime engine and is opened when a report is executed without the destination being specified in the Dexterity Run Report code.
In the Dynamics.dic. This Report Destination window is used by developers to ask for report destination information in advance. This information is then passed to the report writer when the developer calls a report, usually after some sort of temporary file processing.

The first Report Destination window from the runtime cannot be customized by VBA or Dexterity. You cannot add it to VBA and you cannot register a Dexterity trigger against it.

The only interactions that are possible with this window are by using the VBA's SendKeys command to control using keyboard key strokes or using pass through Dexterity sanScript.

The Dex.dic can be referenced as dictionary 1 with the execute() function or the unsupported method of calling Dexterity from VBA via the Continuum Integration Library. Please see the materials in the following posts for more information on these methods:

Cross Dictionary Dexterity Development

Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Airlift 2008

The second Report Destination window which is part of the core Dynamics.dic application dictionary and can be referenced easily by both VBA and Dexterity.

I hope this explains the apparent inconsistent behavior.

David

Asus Eee PC and Microsoft Dynamics GP

David Musgrave — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

So you have now all heard about the fun I have had getting my ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-H netbook working with Windows 7 with the latest and greatest BIOS and drivers. If you missed out on the saga, please have a look at the posts: Asus Eee PC BIOS woes with Windows 7 and Asus Eee PC BIOS joys with Windows 7.

Since, those articles were written, Asus have released another BIOS update build 1102 as well as some updated drivers and utilities, which I have installed with no issues. Windows 7 runs extremely well on the netbook. Especially now that I have also expanded the memory on the machine to the maximum 2Gb supported by the Atom N280 processor.

Just to see how well it would perform, I have installed SQL Server 2008 SP1 along with Microsoft Dynamics GP v10.0 SP4 and Dexterity v10.0 SP4. Everything works and performs well. I did change the SQL Server service to start manually, so it would not have a negative impact on the system when it was not being used.

I don't think it will replace a full notebook or desktop with a large screen as a suitable machine for a developer or consultant (I like having lots of screen real estate and 10" 1024 x 600 is not enough), but it can be useful if you just want to check something while on the move or do a quick demo.

David