New Web Form Controls

In my first blog entry I posted a list of new features that will be available in 11.1, which is scheduled to be released on November 15th. Over the next week I'll provide more information about each of these new features. Let's start with the new controls for .NET Web Form applications.

If you've done any work with PowerBuilder 11 and .NET Web Form targets, you know that you need to install and configure the IE Web Controls on the IIS server before you can deploy and run your web form application. Fortunately this is a process you only have to do once (per server anyway), but it can be a pain to get working, especially if you miss a step.

With 11.1 you will have a new web configuration option called PBWebControlSource. By default it is set to IE, which means your application will use the IE Web Controls for menus, toolbars, the DatePicker control, and the MonthCalendar control. You can change that property to RAD though and then the new and improved controls will be implemented at runtime.

Besides having a better look and feel, the RAD controls require no developer installation or configuration. They get installed automatically when you deploy your application.
Here is a screen shot of what the RAD menu and toolbar controls look like:

Note that the rad menu control supports menu icons and gradients. An annoying feature of the IE Web Control menu was that the user had to actually click on the text of a menu item for the clicked event to fire. If they clicked to the left or right of the text, nothing happened.

The new menu control behaves the same way as a Windows application menu. The toolbar also supports gradient and looks much like the contemporary menu in a PowerBuilder Windows application.

The new DatePicker and MonthCalendar controls look a lot better and offer most of the features found in the Windows version of those controls.

The TreeView control was going to be replaced but we ran into performance issues during testing and had to remove that control. This means that if your application uses TreeView controls you still need to have the IE Web Controls installed and configured on your web server, even if you choose the RAD configuration option. We are looking at replacing the IE Web Controls TreeView control in 11.2 (due out in late Q1 2008 by the way) with an AJAX control.

In my next entry I'll talk about the enhancements in 11.1 to support Vista. I'll also go through a list of things to watch out for when using PowerBuilder on Vista, or deploying your applications on that OS.