My first post over at Dynamics Latam

My first post on COM interop and Dexterity is out over at Dynamics Latam! This will be an excellent venue for me to give back to Spanish speaking community Microsoft Dynamics GP in North, Central, and South America and will sure up other venues to spread the GP gospel.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

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VBA - Suppressing CTRL+Break or CTRL+C in VBA Customizations

VBA is by far one of the best customization tools available to Microsoft Dynamics GP developers and as such it is widely used across a number of production environments to deliver functionality that ranges in various degrees of complexity.

However, one of the issues with VBA -- at least until now -- is the fact that an end user can inadvertly press CTRL+Break (older keyboards) or CTRL+C and stop the execution of a script. Now imagine if that script is say, some code developed to calculate 401K contributions when payroll is ran... the results will certainly not be pretty!

With this in mind, we can use a USER32.DLL library funcion to disable user input when critical VBA code is required to be executed in a block. The following shows how to implement such code:

BlockInput function

Private Declare Function BlockInput Lib "user32" (ByVal fBlock As Long) As
Long

We can now use this function across any of our VBA customizations, as follows:

Sample Window_BeforeOpen code

Private Sub Window_BeforeOpen(OpenVisible As Boolean)
  BlockInput True
  ' All the code you need to run here
  ...
  ' MAKE SURE TO RE-ENABLE THE INPUT
  BlockInput False
End Sub

There are several applications for this code, but whatever you do, don't forget to re-enable the user input, otherwise you will end up with one dead mouse and keyboard!

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

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Building a COM Interop Assembly to use with Microsoft Dexterity

I am currently building some customizations for a customer of mine in the aerospace industry. My customer required a library of trigonometric functions that could be used to extend their Dexterity integrating applications.

To solve this problem, we turned to .NET to create COM interop assembly. The idea was to take advantage of the standard Math class methods available with the System namespace - System.Math . The following is an excerpt of the code we created:

TrigonometricFunctions.cs

//Created by Mariano Gomez, MVP
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace TrigonometricFunctions
{
    public class TrigonometricFunctions
    {
        [GuidAttribute("8268A95E-6FCB-4FB2-88A1-1E38F49F4FB8"), ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.AutoDual)]
        public class TrigFn
        {
            // dx in degrees
            public double fSin(double dx)
            {
                double angle = Math.PI * dx / 180.0;
                // returns sin(dx)
                return Math.Sin(angle);
            }

            // dx in degrees
            public double fCos(double dx)
            {
                double angle = Math.PI * dx / 180.0;
                // returns cos(dx)
                return Math.Cos(angle);
            }

            // dx in degrees
            public double fTan(double dx)
            {
                double angle = Math.PI * dx / 180.0;
                // returns tan(dx)
                return Math.Tan(angle);
            }

        }
    }
}

Once the functions in the TrigFn class were in place, we set up the assembly information in Visual Studio's marking the option to Make assembly COM visible.


So we did not have to register the assembly manually, we took advantage of Visual Studio's ability to register the assembly for COM interop under the Build settings. For purposes of demostration, I created a simple Dexterity form, as shown below:



The following is the code added to the '(L) Sine' button:

Sine button CHG script

{ script: l_Sine_CHG }

local TrigonometricFunctions oTrig;
local currency angle, sine;

oTrig = new TrigonometricFunctions.TrigFn();

'(L) Prompt' = "The Sine value is ";
'(L) Conversion' = oTrig.fSin('(L) Angle');

In the code above, TrigonometricFunctions is a data type created after adding the TrigonometricFunctions COM interop assembly as a library to our Dexterity application. The data type references the TrigonometricFunctions.TrigFn class.

References:

Using a .NET Assembly from a Dexterity-Based Application - Click here

Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 White Paper: Using a .NET Assembly from a Dexterity-based Application - Click here

Downloads:

TrigonometricFunctions .NET project - Click here
Dexterity Sample App - Click here

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

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