VST Controls by Envisage Software

From the team that brought you Friday Funny: I Want My MVP.

From the developers of PostMaster…. comes an amazing new customisation tool….

• VST Controls.

Yes, Andrew Dean from Envisage Software along with Steve Endow MVP from Precipio Services have been busy working away on some really cool technology for Visual Studio Tools developers and have just released it as a free tool.

VST Controls stands for Visual Studio Tools Controls and it does exactly what it says. It allows developers to overlay any Visual Studio control over the top of a Microsoft Dynamics GP window.

Normally, a Visual Studio Tools developer that needs an extra field on a Dynamics GP window would use the Modifier tool to add a local field to a window, then use the DAG.EXE (Dictionary Assembly Generator) tool to create the DLL with the modified window in it and then write their code against the field in the modified window. This does work well, but you are limited to the Dexterity control types and requires the code to be developed specifically for the individual customer’s site.  You cannot copy a modified dictionary assembly from site to site as they are likely to have different modified windows.

Introducing VST Controls ….

VST Controls allows you to dynamically create any Visual Studio supported control and overlay it on to a Dynamics GP window. You can place the controls anywhere in the window (as seen by the Windows operating system), including outside of the Dexterity portion of the window.  If you don’t find the space it would possible to use the Modifier to resize the window or move fields around to make the space. The modified window can be provided as a customisation package, but in this case there is no need to use the DAG tool. The fields are shown on the window in the location specified and can be coded against as desired. The added controls are tied to the window and will be updated when the window is moved.

Just to give you a taste of what is possible, one thing that I have heard asked for many times is the ability to show an image of an item on the Item Maintenance window. See the green highlighted section on the screenshot below. Your wishes have come true.

For more information visit the VST Controls page:

• VST Controls – Envisage Software

Please provide lots of feedback as Andrew wants to know what the community think and how many developers will use the tool. This information helps justify further development.

You can comment here or on Andrew’s GPUG Forum thread.

Enjoy

David

This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.