In this short article, we’d like to review how to review and redeploy Microsoft Dexterity’s legacy customization, which is probably still in production mode in your company. The old Great Plains Software Dynamics and eEnterprise product lines were extensively adapted to fit business processes in the 1990s. Now is the time to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0 and redesign custom software

or eConnect. This tool and connector allows you to manipulate: create, modify, delete and change GP objects, such as Customer, SOP Invoice, Purchase Order, Employee, etc.

or Extender. This tool allows you to create new GP screens and tables and associate them with native GP screens, such as customer maintenance

or Microsoft Visual Studio. When you implement eConnect and custom tables, created by Extender, you may consider creating a DLL project in Visual Studio.Net to add business logic

or Retro Dexterity. Great Plains Dexterity allows you to create screens, which will be integrated into the security scope of the Microsoft Dynamics GP workstation (and the specific GP user). In this case, you can call the DLL procedures, created in MS VS as suggested above, directly from Microsoft Dynamics GP Dexterity sancscripts in the form of alternative or new GP dexterity.

o Skill Relics. There are legacy Dex techniques, which need to be migrated to new technologies. One of these dinosaurs are skill cursors. You’ll see these are really slow bottlenecks if your custom logic requires a lot of data processing. This is similar to cursors in Microsoft Transact SQL – it’s a bit slow compared to the added select statement. Historically, dex cursors supported cross-platform databases: ctree, faircom/btrieve/Pervasive SQL, and MS SQL Server 6.5/7.0. When Microsoft Business Solutions was formed on the basis of the old GPS, Microsoft decided to focus solely on the MS SQL Server platform.