Development Matters Blog

Merit Solutions, Inc., a 2009 Microsoft Dynamics President’s Club member and provider of Microsoft Dynamics business applications, is proud to announce the successful go-live of Mid-Continent Instruments’ new Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation. Based in Wichita, Kansas, Mid-Continent Instruments is an industry leader in the overhaul/exchange, repair and manufacturing of aircraft instruments for the general aviation industry; the company operates on of the world’s largest FAA-authorized instrument overhaul and exchange programs. In an effort to automate business processes and improve customer contact management, the company began to look for an easily deployable customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

Mid-Continent has used the Microsoft stack for its core IT infrastructure for a number of years, and its IT team is very familiar with the Microsoft development and integration products and tools. Their employees are also familiar with the Microsoft Dynamics and Office systems, having used Microsoft Dynamics GP and many Office programs daily. “The capability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to easily integrate with other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Office, was the determining factor in our decision,” says Cindy Highbarger, Chief Financial Officer at Mid-Continent.

Merit Solutions helped Mid-Continent review internal sales, service, and marketing processes to determine a way to automate business processes and improve the company’s responsiveness to changing market trends. Additionally, Mid-Continent wanted real-time access to information about all interactions with customers. Using the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step implementation methodology, Merit Solutions was able to successfully implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM with real-time, two-way integrations with Microsoft Dynamics GP and Mid-Continent’s phone system. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution will provide Mid-Continent employees a more unified way to track customer information and sales data across the entire company.

When asked what she liked about working with Merit Solutions, Cindy appreciates Merit’s ability to implement new solutions in order to improve internal operating procedures. “Merit Solutions has always been able to fit new software systems to our optimized business processes, without making Mid-Continent accept less-than-optimal processes in order to fit any systems.”

Learn more about Mid-Continent Instruments.

FxCop is a free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft’s .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It will ensure that the specified rules are used in the source code.

FxCop analyzes the compiled object code, not the original source code, and searches for more than 200 different possible coding standards violations.

Sometimes it is needed to automatically remove FxCop related “SuppressMessage” attributes when they are no longer needed.

If you’re using Visual Studio Team System, then FxCop is completely integrated and when you exclude messages it automatically applies the new SuppressMessage attributes to the appropriate location in code.

If you’re using Visual Studio Professional edition, then you have to use the external FxCop.

It turns out you have to enable your project to recognize the SuppressMessage attribute by FIRST adding a condition compilation symbol.

To include this symbol do the following:

For C# projects:
- In Solution Explorer, right-click your project and choose Properties
- In the Properties window, choose the Build tab
- In the Conditional compilation symbols text box enter CODE_ANALYSIS

The next step you have to do is to right-click the error message in FxCop UI and select “Copy As” – “SuppressMessage” (or “Module-level SupressMessage”). Then you can simply paste the attribute into your code at the appropriate location.

While working with Microsoft Dynamics GP, I came into a situation where I was not able to open the Purchase Order Entry window regularly, following the path:

Transactions -> Purchasing -> Purchase Order Entry

Instead, I got the warning:

After researching on the internet, I found some instructions to repair it. I tried the instructions, but still nothing happened.

Then, I tried the following steps and it worked. So, if you get this message, try these easy steps. They do not require a lot of time or any new settings, and they might be helpful.

1. Open the Purchase Order Processing window, using the following path:
   Microsoft Dynamics GP -> Tools -> Setup -> Purchasing -> Purchase Order Processing
2. Open the Purchase Order Processing Setup Options window clicking the Options button on the Purchase Order Processing window.
3. Click the OK button on the Purchase Order Processing Setup Options window and the window will be closed.
4. Open the PA Purchase Order Processing Setup Options window clicking the Project button on the Purchase Order Processing window.
5. Click the OK button on the PA Purchase Order Processing Setup Options window and the window will be closed.
6. Click the OK button on the Purchase Order Processing window and the window will be closed.

Now, the Purchase Order Entry window should be accessible.

Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) contains a collection of services including version control, work item tracking, and the EventService service. EventService exposes a set of events that performs actions such as sending e-mail or a SOAP-based Web service call.

In this blog, I’ll examine TFS capabilities to create and manage subscriptions. While I will be using Visual Studio 2008 and TFS 2008, most of this column applies equally to TFS 2005.

Built In Alerts

Alerts are notifications in e-mail when certain events occur in your team project. You can subscribe to alerts for yourself or for others, and can select to receive alert messages in either HTML or Plain Text format. However, Team Explorer has 4 different built-in alerts:

Using TFS Exposed Events

Alert subscriptions are stored on the server by team project, and you can add different alerts for each team project that you have permission to open. If you want to get notified for all new workitems, regardless of who they get assigned to, you will want a custom subscription. 

There are a couple of techniques you can use to achieve this.

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