Introduction
Imagine that you are managing a large cloud based solution with lots of moving parts, thousands of users and fairly complicated business logic going on all the time. Now an irate customer phones into support complaining that something bad happened. Sometimes from the explanation you can figure out what happened quite easily. Sometimes what the user described sounds completely inexplicable and impossible…
Introduction
Generally Sage 300 ERP is used in a multi-user environment where users could be distributed across a large building or located in many different sites. Further Sage 300 ERP uses a concurrent licensing model for users, so if you have 10 Lanpaks then 10 people can login at once; however, it doesn’t matter which ten people it is.
Often companies save a bit of money by buying fewer Lanpaks than users…
Introduction
Last week I blogged on some security topics that were prompted by the Heartbleed security hole. Heartbleed was hot while it lasted, but in the end most servers were quickly patched and not a lot of damage was reported. Now this last week Heartbleed was completely pushed aside by the latest Internet Explorer security vulnerability. A lot of the drama of this problem was caused by speculation on whether Microsoft…
Introduction
With the recent Heartbleed security exploit in the OpenSSL library a lot of attention has been focused on how vulnerable our computer systems have become to data theft. With so much data travelling the Internet as well as travelling wireless networks, this has brought home the importance of how secure these systems are. With a general direction towards an Internet of Things this makes all our devices whether…
Introduction
We’ve been working on an interesting POC recently that involved Google like search. After evaluating a few alternatives we chose Elastic Search. Search is an interesting topic, often associated with Big Data, NoSQL and all sorts of other interesting technologies. In this article I’m going to look at a few interesting aspects of Elastic Search and how you might use it.
Elastic Search is an…
Introduction
Usually projects start with a POC (Proof of Concept) and then move on to a real project using some subset of existing resources and then if the project looks exciting, senior management will want it done faster and is willing to throw more resources at it.
In this article I’m looking at some of the problems this causes and some of the solutions to the problem.
Just Ship the POC
In the interest of…
Introduction
In a few previous blog posts I’ve been talking about attracting new employees whether through office design, advice for someone starting their career or corporate mobility. In this article I’ll be looking at some ideas on how to keep existing employees. Generally the value of a high tech company largely depends on the IP contained in the heads of the employees and growth prospects depend on their…
Introduction
My wife, Cathalynn, and I were recently discussing issues with people moving to other cities to pursue their careers and the hard decisions that were involved in doing this. My nephew, Ian Smith, is just starting his career and when choosing where to work has to consider what it takes to grow in the role he eventually accepts. When I started at Computer Associates, if you wanted to move up in the organization…
Introduction
Unstructured time is becoming a common way to stimulate innovation and creativity in organizations. Basically you give employees a number of hours each week to work on any project they like. They do need to make a proposal and at the end give a demo of working software. The idea is to work on projects that developers feel are important and are passionate about, but perhaps the business in general doesn’t…
Introduction
In the early days of computing you could only run one program at a time on a PC. This meant if you wanted to run 10 programs at once you needed 10 computers. Then bit by bit multitasking made its way from mainframes and Unix to PCs, which allowed you to run quite a few programs at a time. Doing this meant you could run all 10 programs on one computer and this worked quite well. However it was still quite…
Introduction
We hold a developer’s exchange (DevEx) every couple of weeks where one of our developers volunteers to present to all the other developers in our office. This past week I presented at the DevEx on what all the core DLLs in our Sage 300 runtime folder do. I thought this might be of interest for a wider audience so here are the gory details.
Architecture
Our marketing supplied architecture diagram…
Introduction
Last weekend I visited my parents in Victoria and my mom mentioned that she had finally used up all the computer punch cards I had left her when I graduated U-Vic. She likes them because they are more solid than paper but lighter than cardboard and are ideal for using as shopping lists and such. To have lasted this long shows how many cards I needed to do all my first and second year Computer Science courses…
Introduction
Optional Fields were added to Sage 300 ERP as the major feature for version 5.3A. They are a great way to add custom data fields to many master and transaction screens in Sage 300. They also have the benefit that we can flow them with the transactions through the system, for instance from an O/E Order to the corresponding A/R Invoice to the G/L Batch. This opens up a lot of power for tracking extra data…
Introduction
For the past few weeks we’ve been playing around with the Sage 300 ERP .Net API and we’ve progress from working with WinForms projects to ASP.Net MVC projects. In this article we are going to look at the metadata that is available from the Sage 300 .Net API and we are going to build a simple ASP.Net MVC project to create a program similar to the SDK’s ViewDoc program to dump out this metadata…
Introduction
A very important aspect of all applications is how they handle errors and how they inform the end user about these errors. When everything is entered properly and people take what is called the “happy path” through the program then there is no issue. But end users will stray from the “happy path” and other circumstances can conspire to cause the need for informing the user of unusual circumstances…
Introduction
In this blog posting we are going to switch from using WinForms projects to an ASP.Net MVC project. ASP.Net MVC is Microsoft’s newest Web Development Platform. Be careful not to confuse ASP.Net MVC with ASP.Net. Both are still available and have similar version numbers, both are still part of Visual Studio, but they are quite different. The main problem with ASP.Net is that it doesn’t handle HTML5…
Introduction
So far as we’ve explored the Sage 300 ERP .Net API we’ve either read rather specific records via their key segments or we’ve browsed through all the records in a table. But more generally applications are interested in processing through subsets of the entire table in an efficient manner. For instance to get all invoices for a given customer or all G/L Accounts for a specific region. In this article we are…
Introduction
Last week we looked at opening and composing groups of Views that will work together to accomplish a task. Now we will start to look at how to use the View API via .Net to accomplish common tasks. For Views that work alone this is fairly straight forwards and is just a matter of knowing which methods to call and in which order. For using multiple Views together it is a bit more complicated, but follows a…
Introduction
In the past couple of weeks we’ve had a look at opening sessions with the Sage 300 ERP .Net API and then opening a View and doing some simple View operations. This week we are going to start looking at the more complicated case of document entry which involves “header/detail” type Views as well as composing multiple Views together. I talked a bit about these concepts in this article on…
Introduction
I’m planning to write a series of blog articles on the Sage 300 ERP API and in particular on the .Net API that has been part of Sage 300 since version 5.1A. I have a couple of goals with these articles:
Introduction
When SDK applications are launched from the Desktop, they are passed an object handle that they can use to create a session that exactly matches the session of the desktop that launched them. Further the desktop can manage these programs and for instance put up an error message if you try to close the Desktop while they are still running.
Quite a few people create programs that aren’t written using our…
