Architecture

Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP consists of runtime components and development components.

Runtime components

The runtime components for Visual Studio Tools are installed with Microsoft Dynamics GP, and provide the functionality used by the integrations. These consist of the following:

Dexterity Shell   This assembly (Microsoft.Dexterity.Shell.dll) provides the drawing capabilities that allow an integrating application to match the appearance of Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Dexterity Bridge   This assembly (Microsoft.Dexterity.Bridge.dll) provides the access to events in Microsoft Dynamics GP, as well as the resources in the application dictionaries.

Application assemblies   Each dictionary that will be accessed by a Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP integration will have an application assembly. Each application assembly provides access to the resources in its corresponding dictionary. For example, the Application.Dynamics.dll assembly provides access to the resources in the Dynamics.dic dictionary.

Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP includes the application assemblies for all the modules that ship with Microsoft Dynamics GP. You can use the Dictionary Assembly Generator tool (Dag.exe) to create application assemblies for other third-party dictionaries for Microsoft Dynamics GP. You will learn more about this tool in Dictionary Assembly Generator.

AddIns folder   The assemblies for the integrating applications created with Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP are placed in this folder. When Microsoft Dynamics GP is launched, it automatically looks in this folder and attempts to launch the integrating applications it finds there.

Development components

The following development components are installed in the folder where you chose to install Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP:

DAG.exe   This is the Dictionary Assembly Generator tool, used to create application assemblies for dictionaries. You will use this to create application assemblies for third-party dictionaries that do not have them. You will also use it to create application assemblies for forms dictionaries in cases where your integration must interact with modified forms in Microsoft Dynamics GP.

IntelliSense XML files    The IntelliSense XML file contains the information about the application assembly that is displayed in the IntelliSense within Visual Studio. The name of the application XML file matches that of the application assembly it corresponds to. For example, the Application.Dynamics.xml file contains information about the Application.Dynamics.dll assembly.

The following components are installed into the Visual Studio installation:

Visual Basic project   This is the template project for an add-in that is based in Visual Basic.

Visual C# project   This is the template project for an add-in that is based in Visual C#.