GP 2015 R2–What’s coming and GP’s roadmap

With Convergence all wrapped up – David Musgrave has started his series of posts covering his experience at his blog. A couple of slides from the general session are worth checking out if you haven’t seen them already. One of the exciting things on the roadmap is the HTML5 Web client on the roadmap for R3.

Free Windows 10, IoT and Azure Technet event by Microsoft in Sydney

Microsoft is running Technet Update at Australian Ballroom and Exhibition Room 14 Carrington Street, Sydney on the 16th of April, 2015. Register for this event here, should be worth your time.

 

Agenda

9:00am – 10:00am

Keynote - Getting to the value of the Internet of Things

Lee Hickin - IoT Commercial Lead, Microsoft Australia 

The Internet of Everything has become a catch-all phrase to describe adding connectivity and intelligence to just about every device in order to give them special functions, from tiny devices that might travel in our bloodstream to fully automated large scale mining operations. Billions of sensors will be shipped each year and the possibilities are endless. But what should be connected? and Why? Come along to this session and hear why businesses should care about the internet of things…….and learn where the real value lies. Microsoft will lay out its vision for how businesses can best take advantage of this growing trend and how it’s cloud and Windows technologies will offer a complete end to end solution

10:00am – 10:30am

Break

Stream 1 – Windows 10

Stream 2 – Microsoft Cloud OS

10:30am – 11:30am

Windows 10 – What does the new OS mean for Enterprises?

Foundation for the Software Defined Datacenter

11:40am – 12:40pm

Windows 10 Security – What’s new?

Extending Enterprise Networks to Azure using ExpressRoute

12:40pm – 1:30pm

Lunch

1:30pm – 2:30pm

Windows 10 – Deployment

Windows Azure Pack Overview

2:40pm – 3:40pm

Windows 10 for Mobile Devices: What’s Next?

Getting started with Microsoft Azure IaaS

3:40pm – 4:00pm

Break  (Close and Prize Draw)

4:00pm – 5:00pm

Networking drinks

Using the new Dynamics GP 2015 REST Services in SBA (Service Based Architecture)

If you have been following my blog, you probably know how excited I am about this feature. Unfortunately, the documentation can be a little hard to find. The important thing to remember is that as this is a part of the web client – that is where you will find the relevant documentation. 

Paul Haag at InterDyn has just written a great post summarizing the steps he followed.  Using the Dynamics GP Service Based Architecture (Paul Haag) 

Additionally as you are stuck(and its okay if you are, this is Version 1 of the SBA) – you might find the following notes and resources helpful.

• There are three logs you can look to for information on requests that fail, the GP Service log, Dexterity Service Log and the Request Log.  All logs are located in ProgramData\Microsoft Dynamics\GPSvc\Logs. The Dexterity Service log will tell you if the request made it to the Dexterity instance and is in the Inst_DefaultInstance\DexterityService directory. All requests tie together with a correlation ID. Read more at Debugging in the Dynamics GP 2015 Service Based Architecture
• You need to place the new Application.PRODUCTNAME.dll in your GP runtime folder.  After restarting your services, a good way to see if your endpoint is available is by using discovery (url below).  That will show all the dictionaries that have been DAG'ed and have available service endpoints. https://<MachineName>/GPService/Tenants(DefaultTenant)/Companies(Company Name)/Help/

Read more at Service Based Architecture and Custom Procedures  (Thanks Rob Bernhardt)

• When creating service procedures in the service based architecture one of the key steps is to define service metadata including setting the Service Enabled switch to TRUE. We also add a Service Procedure Metadata property which contains the relevant information for the GP Service to wire the procedure calls up to their URI endpoints. In addition to this, the procedure’s class definition will now contain a third invoke method which the service uses for parsing the request and building up the response. Read more at - DAG (Dictionary Assembly Generator) – What’s New in GP 2015

Chance to Fix a Bad Name

David Musgrave has just announced that he has completed the exclusive agreement with Microsoft to obtain the Support Debugging Tool source code.

He’s now looking at community feedback to fix the horrible name which always took a few tries to explain to people. “Why do I need a debugging tool ?” – most people I recommended the tool to asked me.

Go Vote for a new name that makes sense here - Where is the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015?

PS – It was a good thing the tool was named the support debugging tool. With a slightly better name, and consequently even more popularity David would have had much more difficulty getting the source code !

Light it Up Challenge–Microsoft Australia

If like me, you think Internet of Things is the next big thing, here is a fun little event by Microsoft around it.

Code it. Light it. Win it!

All you have to do is sign up to receive the Challenge Kit, and complete all three challenges.
Tune into Microsoft’s six week lab series and discover how to program your device.
If your LED device is one of 5 to light up on April 13 2015, then you've won.
During the challenge, you'll learn how to code, build and deploy with the Internet of Things.
We'll give you an IoT overview, explain the architecture and MS platform.
Get started today!
*Terms and conditions apply: http://aka.ms/lightitup

See more here - Internet of Things - Light it Up Challenge

Setting up Dynamics GP 2015 in 15 minutes

In the past year, I have done a few run throughs of setting up Dynamics GP 2013 in 5/10/15 minutes much to the amazement of experienced consultants. Now The GP 2015 Virtual Machine is available in the MSDN Azure gallery, so you can start doing the same magic with the latest version of GP. If you need help with this, feel free to add a comment or shoot an email and I will put up a short video tutorial.

Read the post from Errol - Announcing, Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 image available in the MSDN Azure gallery.

Do you need to access a Microsoft Dynamics GP web client installation for a quick test or demo? Need access to a Microsoft Dynamics GP development environment? The Microsoft Dynamics GP images available in the MSDN gallery on Microsoft Azure can help. Use this image to create a virtual machine with Microsoft Dynamics GP fully configured in a matter of a few minutes. The resulting image will contain Visual Studio 2013 Premium and SQL Server 2012 Express along with the following Microsoft Dynamics GP components.

• Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client

• Microsoft Dynamics GP SDK

• Dexterity for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Dexterity Shared Components

• eConnect for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP SDK

• Microsoft Dynamics GP pre-requisite software (including Microsoft Lync 2010 SDK Runtime, Microsoft Silverlight 5, Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office and Microsoft Application Error Reporting)

Pro Power Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP

David Musgrave is looking at revamping, and recharging the amazing, but awfully named Support Debugging tools. My suggestion to David has been to name them Pro Power Tools – what do you think about the name ? Tell David Directly at Where is the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015?

If you have been living under a rock and don’t know what the SDT is read all about it here - Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP (SDT).