AcumatiCaresOne of the most highly rated sessions delivered in our Virtual DevCon was Sergey Marenich’s Advanced Framework Tips & Tricks. He did a masterful job flushing out a number very useful activities that a developer on our platform can do to be more efficient and productive as well as some good coding practices. Since different individuals learn and benefit from a variety of modalities, we thought it would be good to share Sergey’s wisdom in written form as well. I’ll distribute the content in bite-size chunks over the next several blog posts.
Last week, I focused on Configuring Your Acumatica Instance (Part I). Today, I will spend time on Configuring your Development Tools and Disabling Web Site Compilation – Tips 2 & 4.
As a review, below are the tips we are discussing in this series. I’m skipping Finding More Information Through Communities (Tip 3) since I have covered this topic in a past post. Also, I have covered Tip 5, Debugging Acumatica Code in an earlier post. You can read it here.
Tip 1 – Configuring Your Acumatica Instance
Tip 2 – Configuring Your Tools
Tip 3 – Finding More Information Through Communities
Tip 4 – Disabling Web Site Compilation
Tip 5 – Debugging Acumatica Code
Tip 6 – Auto-Calc with Formulas
Tip 7 – Minimize Duplication
Tip 8 – Benefits of Using Events
Tip 9 – Reuse of BQL Queries
Tip 10 – Modifying Selectors
Tip 11 – Fields from Different Views
After installing & configuring your developer instance of Acumatica, you should now install your tools for developing on our platform.
The first thing to do is Install debugger tools. You’ll do this using the Acumatica ERP Configuration wizard. You may have already done this when you installed the software before reading this post. You will be able to run the Configuration wizard as noted in the dialog below.
A nice tool to install is the Attachto-Next as Sergey shares in his presentation. But, unfortunately, it’s not available for Visual Studio Community 2017. However, there are other good tools to use such as Attach To All Things as I show in the screenshot below.
Simply select from the Visual Studio Menu, Tools|Extensions and Updates… then select Online from the left panel and search for “Attach”. You can choose from the list to install the tool.
After installing it, close Visual Studio and restart it and the tool will be ready to install. You will get the following dialog. Click the Modify button.
Once the install finishes, you get the following dialog and you will need to restart one more time.
After starting Visual Studio in “Run as Administrator” mode and opening your Acumatica Website Instance, you can attach to IIS easily through the Tools Menu.
After attaching to IIS, you’ll be able to debug and use the diagnostic tools to monitor events, memory usage, and CPU usage. Note the Diagnostics Tools Pane on the right of the next screenshot.
You can of course attach to the IIS process manually by selecting Debug from the menu in Visual Studio and then selecting Attach to Process… or using the key combination Ctrl+Alt+P. Once you do this the following dialog pops up. Simply press “w” and you will go near or right to the file we need to attach: w3wp.exe. Select this file and press the Attach button. See the screenshot below.
When you are working with Visual Studio, it is better to disable Web Site Compilation. The reason being it is quite slow and will eat into your productivity over time and it is not needed.
To do this click on the Properties Icon (Wrench) in the Solution Explorer Pane on the right.
Then click on the build in the left list box. Choose No Build from the first drop-down menu and un-check the Build Web site as part of the solution. Then click the OK button. By doing this you will go from minutes to under a second in compilation time. This is because Visual Studio will no longer compile every single web page of your solution. The just-in-time compiler will do this anyway.
As in the previous post, Part I of Tips & Tricks, these are very simple things you can do to increase your productivity as a developer on your platform. The xRP Platform provides you the development environment, tools and APIs you need to develop world-class applications. You focus more on your core-competencies and secret sauce when developing solutions for your customers. We help you cut down your development time and get your products to market faster.
Next week we’ll continue with the series, offering you more tips and tricks you can use today.
