Microsoft Dynamics GP Customization: Dexterity vs. Extender, plus eConnect

Alba Spectrum Group, 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com http://www.albaspectrum.com http://www.enterlogix.com.br

Microsoft Great Plains is currently under substantial technology redesign. To remind you the history – Great Plains Dexterity was architectured in earlier 1990th as IDE and shell, written in C programming language to become in turn development tool and scripting – Sanscript language. Later on Microsoft purchased Great Plains Software on the edge of the 21st Century. At about this time we see two emerging products: eXtender, written by

Australian company eOne and eConnect – instrument, initially designed for web eCommerce developers.
• Dexterity. The idea was bright back in earlier 1990th to provide Great Plains Dynamics certain level of DB and computer platform independence and quick switch in the case of emergency. C programming language was introduced for the majority of old-good-days platforms: Unix, IBM PC/Microsoft Windows, Solaris, AIX, later on Linux. As an expense of this flexibility, Dexterity had to use cursor-driven data access/modification engine, to be compared with aggregated SQL SELEC and UPDATE statements. Aggregated statements provide a way more advanced performance
• Extender. Sometimes you think about funny questions in software development. Let’s say we provide a shell over Dex itself and train end-user or developer to prototype new custom logic in forms, tables, views and even provide the mechanism to include dex sanscript scriptlets. Would it be advantage over using raw Dexterity to build all this from scratch. The answer is more likely – yes, this is great and it is much easier and reliable to deploy secondary shell (extender), however you should understand the drawbacks. Extender, being dex construction should probably share the future fate of dex technology. And secondly – if you produce custom add-ons for Dynamics GP, you should probably use initial tool. However if you are end customer and just need to have job done – Extender is a good option
• eConnect. This tool is resolving Dex limitation as proprietary scripting language and opens GP objects pool to Microsoft Visual Studio developers.

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