Starting today, I will introduce a weekly series dedicated to explore other Microsoft technologies that may seem totally unrelated to Dynamics GP. These articles are based on experiences acquired through pet projects. These are projects that have not made it beyond my computing lab and have become a true passion of mine. My intention is to present them to you the reader with only one goal in mind: show how the use of technology can enhance user interaction with data. The articles will present practical samples of these technologies and how they could perhaps be incorporated into your Dynamics GP development efforts.

Part I: The Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Interface

Today we will explore Silverlight and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Silverlight was originally introduced as a video streaming plug in, but has rapidly evolved into a feature-rich interactive web applications development framework. In turn, Microsoft Virtual Earth, now Bing Maps for Enterprise, is a set of controls and APIs that allow organizations to take advantage of the latest mapping technology to create unique customer experiences by delivering locally relevant information.

The project

As simple as it may sound, this project allows a user, say for example an account executive traveling to see a customer, to obtain not only geographical location information about the customer, but also view important account information on the map interface.

Getting Started

For this project you will need the following laundry list of development tools and technology components:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Microso…

Last night I did a search on 'Cool CSS buttons', to find a technique that would allow me to code buttons that I can change in CSS later if I need too. This particular site has been around for a while, it's nice to be able to give it a face lift every year or so to keep interest. So... I landed on http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2008/04/30/make-fancy-buttons-using-css-sliding-doors-technique.aspx and found exactly what I was looking for. His technique was intended for <a> tags, but lends itself nicely to my mileau which is ASP.NET coding.

This tag:

</asp:LinkButto…

Here is my library code for VB Forms apps. Having it available like this helps speed development

• Write the data access
• Cre…

This simple piece of code creates a DataTable on the fly.

Dim oDTcbo As New DataTable
Dim…