-->

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Dynamics GP Web Client–What will and will not work

With GP 2012 coming out in Q4 2012, its time to  start preparing. David Musgrave has a nice post out about what will and will not work in the web client -

Microsoft Convergence 2012 Houston - GPPC PreGame & Web Client 

Please go read the complete post. I have quoted the unsupported items and David’s recommendations below -

While I think that the development team have achieved some amazing results and that the GP "12" Web client is just fantastic, there are some features of the full Desktop client which will not work in the first version of the Web client. There are some parts that are just too hard at this time and had to be skipped to allow the first release to stay on schedule. So here is the Not Supported in Version 1 list:

  • Workflow
  • Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Customizations (note that Modified windows will work)
  • UI Templates or style sheets for windows
  • Visual Studio Tools (VST) winforms (note that .Net business logic against Dexterity windows will work)

Whether (or when) these features will get into the Web client is not know at this time.

My suggestions at this time to allow customizations to work in the Web client would be:

  • For Dexterity customizations: Implement Ribbons and window Tabs for your forms. For best performance: Avoid using move field command. Clean out dead scripts (scripts with source but no executable code) - There will be a new pragma command to mark a dead script. Change hidden or ~internal~ windows to internal window type.
  • For VBA customizations: Use modified windows as normal, but transfer the business logic from VBA to VB.Net in Visual Studio Tools. Avoid using VBA Userforms.
  • For VS Tools customizations: Avoid using Visual Studio Winforms and use Modifier or Dexterity instead to create/modify windows. Business logic can remain in C# or VB.Net.

Its pretty straight forward – but I think the big decisions that partners would have to make is whether they need to

  • Avoid VBA and VS Tool Windows and go for Dexterity/ Modifier windows with C#
  • Wait for more information about what’s supported in V2 of Web Client

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

With Microsoft leaving in Dexterity crap, this product is just another worthless dud. Microsoft must just rewrite the application in pure .NET and then have a product that can compete in the Accounting Market. All the other major contenders have converted their code to .NET.

Almas Mahfooz said...

Those who could not stand simple language as dexterity usually call it Dexterity crap, and prefer to remain Anonymous when comment. lol

guts.

boilersrock said...

Thanks for the informative post. Seeing that over two years have passed, now, has the web client been updated since then to offer support for modified forms beyond using Dexterity, such as silverlight?

I ask because we are planning to (finally) move from GP2010 to GP2013. Our current GP2010 installation has been heavily modded using VSTools (no VBA!) with about 20+ custom .NET winforms that GP can use. We'd love to take advantage of 2013's web client, but the idea of re-building our winforms is daunting.