Posted on by WinthropDC News, Products, Visual Studio Integration Toolkit

#VSIT Visual Studio Integration Toolkit build 15 released

David Meego - Click for blog homepageWinthrop Development Consultants is pleased to announce Build 15 of Visual Studio Integration Toolkit (VSIT) for Microsoft Dynamics GP was released on 29-Nov-2018.

This build incorporates the first major enhancements to the toolkit since it was first released. There has been a month’s worth of development, testing and documentation go into this build with a number of enhancements to the menu navigation functionality as well as an entire new module of helper functions.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To ensure continued registration after 01-Jul-2018, please update all workstations to Build 13 or later before the current subscription expires. Install over the top of the existing build, no need to uninstall first. You can also copy the updated files from one install to other installs.

Build 15 of Visual Studio Integration Toolkit is available for the following Microsoft Dynamics GP versions:

  • Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 (v11.0)
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and GP 2013 R2 (v12.0)
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 and GP 2015 R2 (v14.0)
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 and GP 2016 R2 (v16.0)
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 and GP 2018 R2 (v18.0)

Updates to Registration System and About window

There has been some further fine tuning of the Registration system to standardize formatting of contact and address details, including changing the country field to a drop down list selection.

Also the About window has been updated for better web client compatibility and the un-install process has been simplified.

Updates to Menu Navigation Functionality

The Menu Navigation functionality now supports adding a menu item as the first entry in a menu using a BelowTag value of -1.

New SetNamedProperty and GetNamedProperty functions have been added for storing and retrieving additional string properties against a menu entry.

New SetAccelerator and GetAccelerator functions have been added for control of the accelerator keys after the inital creation of a menu entry.

Support for up to 10 additional Area Pages has been added using the EventRegisterAreaPage event with the RegisterAreaPage function to create the Area Page button. Then you can use the EventHandlerAreaPage event with the RegisterAreaPageContent function to create the Area Page content when the Area Page is selected.

This Area Page functionality now allows Visual Studio Tools Addins to have their own top level menus grouped onto their own Area Page which means that the menus are now available on the web client.

New Helper Functions Module

A new free module has been added to Visual Studio Integration Toolkit which adds over 220 helper functions to expose functionality that is normal only available to Dexterity developers to Visual Studio developers.  The user guide (see below) contains the list of functions grouped into functional areas.

The functions are available using the path MenusForVisualStudioTools.Forms.VstmHelper.Functions and the easiest way to access them is by defining a helper variable at the top of your code. For example:

 var helper = MenusForVisualStudioTools.Forms.VstmHelper.Functions;

short response = helper.Ask.Invoke("Do you want to save this record?", "&Save", "&Discard", "&Cancel");

Please see the upcoming post for more details on the suite of Helper Functions added.

For a detailed change log, look at the VSTMenus.txt file which is also installed with Visual Studio Integration Toolkit into the Microsoft Dynamics GP application folder. To see the updated documentation, look at the user guide which is also installed with the product.

More Information

For more information see the following pages and articles:

The following article discusses some of the new features in Build 15 in more detail:

Please post comments and feedback. Thank you for your support.

Enjoy

David

23-Feb-2019: Updated to include link to Helper Functions article.

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