Someone asked if anything was different due to COVID-19. Our customer contact is all done over the internet with miles, sometimes thousands, in between. SteadyCode is fully compliant with Arizona Executive Order 2020-18 (“Stay Home, Stay Healthy, Stay Connected”). So we’re still steadily coding, consistent with the name. Stay safe, and don’t hesitate to keep in touch.
Dynamics SL 2018 doesn’t support BSL screen customizations any more. These must be converted to VBA. Contact third-party vendors to obtain updated scripts when appropriate. Here are steps to convert All User, One Group, and Self customizations. Do this in non-production databases, of course. The first step is to export the BSL components from the old environment using “Export Customizations (91.500.00)”. Select all the BSL customizations at the levels above and save the “CST” file. You can edit it with... Continue reading →
SteadyCode entered its sixth year of business this fall. Some customers have been upgrading or making changes to projects written long ago. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post and I thought I’d take a few minutes to share. This morning, when upgrading a custom program that imports Excel spreadsheets to Microsoft Dynamics SL 2018, CU2, my customer wondered when I had originally written it. We found comments in a SQL Script that mentioned July 3, 2001. I... Continue reading →
I often edit Dynamics SL (DSL below) customization files using a text editor. I find this especially helpful when working on customizations with levels between 100 and 299, or when the CST file contains several customizations. I export the customization(s), edit, then import back. I’ve started using VS Code for this recently. It’s easy to configure it. First, add the “VSCode VBA” extension. Click View > Extensions and type VBA in the Search Extension box. Click “VSCode VBA”, then the... Continue reading →
Mike Gifford of Crestwood Associates has written a fine article on customizing the Acumatica Portal. I have one small modification when working with a demo portal with version 2018 R2. Under the Site Map (not the Portal Map), the Customization Project Browser appears as a folder that contains other folders and pages as children. This node is missing when the portal is first installed. As Mike notes, it needs to be added with a SQL Script. Without this node, you... Continue reading →
UPDATE (2023-03-14): You CANNOT use the Visual Studio 2022 Windows Forms designer with the Dynamics SL 2018 CU9 SDK or prior versions at this time. The solution is to use Visual Studio 2019 or earlier versions. The reason is that VS 2022 is a 64-bit application and the Windows Forms designer requires 64-bit controls. The Dynamics SL SDK controls are 32-bit controls. You cannot add them to the toolbox and the designer will show nothing but an error message if... Continue reading →
I’ve been using Profiler to explore Dynamics SL’s database calls for years. Recently, I learned about Extended Events, which is Microsoft’s replacement for Profiler. They’ve done an excellent and, for me, compelling job of replacing Profiler. I’ll abbreviate Extended Events as XEvent(s) or XE below. If you download SSMS 17 from the Microsoft web site, you’ll see something called XEvent Profiler at the bottom of Object Explorer. There are two pre-configured sessions to watch live events. No need to launch... Continue reading →
Have you ever wondered how a Dynamics SL screen customization indicates if a checkbox in a list is checked or unchecked? Perhaps not, but just in case, here’s how it’s done. Checked list items have the ID followed by a semi-colon, then the description. Unchecked items have a colon between the ID and the description. In the list below “GP:Goods for Project” is unchecked. The rest are checked. DL;Description Line,FR;Freight Charges,GP:Goods for Project,MI;Misc Charges,GN;Non-Inventory Goods,SE;Services for Expense,SP;Job Purchases If you... Continue reading →
After moving an Acumatica Visual Studio solution to a new computer the dll was not automatically copied to the bin folder after rebuilding like it had been on the old machine. Yuriy Zaletskyy’s post provided an illustrated solution, reminding me to add a reference from the web site’s bin folder to the VS project that builds the dll. This is one of those “note to self” posts.
UPDATE: Dynamics SL 2018, CU3 (and later CUs) include an msi named “SDKSetupVS2017.msi” that is the official SDK when working with Visual Studio 2017 and 2019. This post remains helpful if you have a prior CU installed and cannot install the latest CU for some reason… Solomon Cloud Solutions published a very similarly named post back in 2016. The post works for our purposes with a few modifications and one caveat. The bolded lines from that post are included in... Continue reading →