PowerBuilder 12 CTP Hands On Guided Tours

PowerBuilder 12 CTP Hands On Events in June

Sybase in conjunction with ISUG will be holding a series of hands on Guided Tours of the new PowerBuilder .NET Community Technology Preview release during the month of June. 

For more information and to register please visit:

www.isug.com/common/UpcomingEvents.html

Events will be held in:

Boston,

New York,

Minneapolis,

Houston,

Denver

The public CTP is scheduled to begin in early June. Download information will be made available here as soon as the program begins.

PowerBuilder Accelerated Development Tour

PowerBuilder Accelerated Development Tour

We’re packing up the PowerBuilder team and hitting the road to bring the latest in PowerBuilder news, code, and goodies to you.

PowerBuilder 11.5 just came out and we want to share how the new features and capabilities will help accelerate your development, bring aesthetic enhancements to your PowerBuilder applications, and simplify .NET development. We are also working fast and furiously on delivering PowerBuilder 12, which blend the Visual Studio Isolated Shell with the prowess of DataWindow and PowerBuilder technology.

Fresh from the labs, we will give you a sneak peek of arguably the biggest news for PowerBuilder since its inception: PowerBuilder 12.

PowerBuilder evangelists and team members are excited to share the latest in PowerBuilder innovations and are looking forward to meeting you at an Accelerated Development event.

Detailed Overview of Topics
PowerBuilder 11.5 The release of PowerBuilder 11.5 brings a multitude of new capabilities and features that will help accelerate your development, bring aesthetic enhancements to your PowerBuilder applications, and simplify .NET development.

Topics covered will include DataWindow® innovations, Native ASE 15, SQL Server® 2008, and Oracle 11g drivers, .NET enhancements: Strong Named Assemblies and IIS7 Support, Security features such as.NET CAS and FDCC, and new premiums included with PB Enterprise: PocketBuilder™ and PowerBuilder Application Server Plug-in.

Sneak Peek at PowerBuilder 12We're going to cover the new exciting and revolutionary features being built into PowerBuilder 12 including:

Visual Studio Isolated Shell
Front to back WPF
Fully Managed Code @ Runtime
WPF DataWindow
WCF Support
Latest in Web Services technologies
Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and SQL Server Support

For more information and to register click here.

PowerBuilder 11.5 and strong-named .NET Assemblies

Another new feature in PowerBuilder 11.5 is the ability to generate strong-named assemblies for any of the four .NET targets (Web Forms, Windows Forms, .NET Web Services or .NET Assemblies). What does this mean?

Well the Help file says this:

A strong name consists of an assembly's identity—its simple text name, version number, and culture information (when provided)—plus a public key and digital signature. It is generated from an assembly file using the corresponding private key. The assembly file contains the assembly manifest that includes the names and hashes of all the files that make up the assembly.

So, what are the benefits of creating strong name assemblies?

First you can be assured that a name is globally unique. According to the MSDN website, strong names satisfy the following requirements:

• 
  Strong names guarantee name uniqueness by relying on unique key pairs. No one can generate the same assembly name that you can, because an assembly generated with one private key has a different name than an assembly generated with another private key.
• 
  Strong names protect the version lineage of an assembly. A strong name can ensure that no one can produce a subsequent version of your assembly. Users can be sure that a version of the assembly they are loading comes from the same publisher that created the version the application was built with.
• 
  Strong names provide a strong integrity check. Passing the .NET Framework security checks guarantees that the contents of the assembly have not been changed since it was built.

Note that creating strong-named assemblies does not imply the same level of trust that is provided by a digital signature and supporting certificate.

More on Graphs in PowerBuilder 11.5

Last week I posted a screen shot of the new 3D Rendering capabilities being added to some of the 3D graphs in PowerBuilder 11.5. It was met with mixed reviews on the PowerBuilder Futures newsgroup (forums.sybase.com) so I went back to the drawing board to see what I could come up with. Apparently there are quite a few configuration settings one can set programmatically to render better looking graphs. For example, the primary color scheme default can be changed by making a couple of function calls for each data point or series. Here is a screen shot of an example application I am putting together to be released when 11.5 ships:

This feature is still in development so the legend doesn't take advantage of the translucency property yet.

Now lets look at a 3D chart that contains a series. First here is a screen shot of the original 3D graph style available in PowerBuilder 11.2 and earlier (and still available in 11.5 if you like the retro look):

Now lets see that same chart with the new 3D (DirectX) rendering turned on and translucency set on some of the series:

Looks a lot better. The new 3D rendering capability will be available for the following 3D graph styles: Area, Column, Pie, Bar, and Line. This should meet the majority of users' 3D graph needs. If you need something more powerful or want a wider selection of charting options, take a look at the FusionCharts demo available on CodeXchange at:

https://powerbuilder.codexchange.sybase.com/files/documents/67/2838/FusionChartsfree.zip

DataWindow Tooltips in 11.5

Today's sneak preview is on the DataWindow Tooltip enhancement in 11.5. This screenshot shows a tooltip on the first_name column:




This shows a tooltip with the title property populated as well as an icon property selected. It also shows the bubble format. Below you can see the list of properties that will be available for tooltips:



It is important to point out that you can place a tooltip on any control on the DataWindow. Drawing objects, buttons, nested reports, computed fields, labels, they all support the tooltip property!

New Graph Styles in 11.5

G'Day from Down Under. I've been in Australia since April 27th and while it is great to be "home" (I lived in Sydney from 1995-2000) I've been too busy to keep my blog up to date. I've got a few spare minutes today so I want to share with you another new feature being added to PowerBuilder 11.5.

There will be some new 3D graph styles based on DirectX technology. These new graphs will be available for Win32 and .NET Windows Forms applications.



Here's a screen shot of the new 3D Pie Chart. It isn't feature complete yet but it should give you an idea of what to expect.





You'll notice that there are some new properties in the DataWindow painter and some new functions are being added to allow you to get and set data and series labeling on various 3D graphs.

PowerBuilder 11.5

PowerBuilder 11.5 will have a number of DataWindow enhancements. Over the next several days I will be posting some screen shots along with descriptions of many of these new features.

I should point out that these enhancements are for Win32 (PowerBuilder native) and .NET Windows Forms applications only. They won't be available in .NET Web Forms applications (sorry!). Eventually these enhancements will be rolled into DataWindow .NET 3.0.

The first enhancement I want to demonstrate is the background image for DataWindows. This new property lets you select a .bmp, .jpg, .gif, .png, .rle, or .wmf file as a background for your DataWindow. I'm using a .jpg file of the Sybase headquarters building in Dublin, California in this example. There are several tile mode options available from "original size" to "fit to width" to "flip xy". There are also several clip properties and a transparency property. Of course all of the properties can be set in the DataWindow painter or programmatically in your code.

Speaking transparency. Notice the state_name column? There is now a text transparency property for columns and labels (computed fields too). In this example I have set the value to 50%. The state_id column's text transparency property value is set to zero (completely opaque).

The background color property for both columns has been set to transparent so you can see the image come through the columns. You can also set a color and then set the transparency property anywhere from 0% to 100% (which gives you the same effect as setting the background color to transparent):

So, lets use this DataWindow in a Drop Down DataWindow column.

Pretty cool! It might be totally impractical and make it more difficult for your users to see the data in the Drop Down DataWindow but it sure looks nice!

In my next entry I will talk about the new gradient properties being added to the DataWindow. The screen shot above gives you a hint as to what you can do with these properties but it barely scratches the surface.

PowerBuilder 11.5 Screen shots

On the PowerBuilder newsgroups I promised to post some screen shots of some of the new DataWindow features in PowerBuilder 11.5. Well a new build will be available tomorrow (April 24th) and I want to use that build to show some of the features. Thanks for your patience.

PowerBuilder and SOA Webcast This Week!

In case you didn't get the email, I'm repeating the information here:

PowerBuilder has always been about helping you solve very real business needs in the fastest, most uncomplicated way. Now, we are bringing you an educational two-part webcast series that will show you how to employ PowerBuilder to accelerate your SOA development effort.

During the first webcast, Sybase PowerBuilder evangelist, John Strano will show you how using PowerBuilder and DataWindow technology in the implementation layer of your Service Oriented Architecture projects will preserve the SOA promise of Business Agility. During the second webcast, John will walk you through how PowerBuilder safeguards agility when presenting SOA - originating data to the user for analysis and modification.

We hope you can join us as we show you how PowerBuilder’s proven technology can continue to solve your emerging business challenges. Register for the PowerBuilder and SOA webcast series today.

Details:Webcast Part I: How to accelerate SOA Development with PowerBuilder Date: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Time: 9 AM PT/12 PM ET

Webcast Part II: Safeguarding SOA agility with PowerBuilder Date: Wednesday, April 30th, 2008Time: 9 AM PT/12 PM ET

Find out more and sign up here

Calling an application's window in a Web Form application

One question I'm frequently asked is, "How can I have my PowerBuilder application's windows turned into separate web pages?". If you've deployed a PowerBuilder application to the web using the .NET Web Form target, and then examined the application's directory on the web server you've noticed that there is only one ASP .NET page created (default.aspx)!

Think of that as the web equivalent of the bootstrapper .exe PowerBuilder generates in a traditional Windows application. The goal for PowerBuilder 11 was to allow you to take existing Windows applications to the web with a minimal amount of refactoring. That's all well and good, but many of you out there want to incorporate pieces of your existing PowerBuilder applications into standalone web applications or portals created using Visual Studio or some other product. Don't worry, all is not lost. It might take a little extra work (how much work depends on how you've designed your client server application in the first place) but you can leverage your existing client server application logic into new web applications without having to do a complete rewrite.

The trick is to use the commandline parameter. If you open the application object in PowerBuilder and go to the Open event, you'll notice that it recieves one argument called Commandline:




For Web Form targets, PowerBuilder lets you pass a value to the commandline by using the PBCommandParm parameter. It is as straightforward as calling the application in a URL like this:

http://myserver/myapp/default.htm?PBCommandParm=CUSTOMER

In the application Open event you can capture the value and process it any way you like. For example:

CHOOSE CASE commandline
CASE "CUSTOMER"
Open (w_mss_customer_master)
CASE "PRODUCT"
Open (w_mss_product_master)
CASE ELSE
Open ( w_mssmain_frame )
END CHOOSE

Using the Marketing Support System sample application as an example, if the application were to be run with no commandline parameter, the standard MDI frame would open and the browser would looks something like this:

http://myserver/myapp



If we call the same application but use a URL like this:

http://myserver/myapp/default.htm?PBCommandParm=CUSTOMER

The browser will open and select the Customer window:





Note: we call the default.htm file to hide the web browser's menu and toolbar. Default.htm is just a wrapper to the default.aspx but it contains some Javascript code to resize the browser and hide the menu and toolbar.

So that's all there is to it. Or is it? What if you want to pass multiple parameters? Well there is only one commandline parameter for the application's open event, but you can pass multiple parameters in using %20, the ASCII character code for an empty space in the URL.

http://myserver/myapp/default.htm?PBCommandParm=CUSTOMER%20FISH

All of the parameters will get concatenated into one commandline string so you will need to use the left, mid, or right functions, along with the pos function in Powerscript to parse them out (see the PowerBuilder Help file for details).

Support for the Data Pipeline in PowerBuilder .NET Windows Forms Targets

Do you use Data pipelines in your applications? If so you should know that PowerBuilder 11.1 supports the use of the Data Pipeline in .NET Windows Forms targets.

You need to deploy a new DLL, pbdpl110.dll, with your applications if they use pipelines. This DLL must be deployed with both .NET Windows Forms and standard PowerBuilder Win32 applications.

The pbdpl110.dll has been added to the Runtime Packager.

I'm leaving for Europe today so my posts may be a bit erratic this week, depending on my schedule and Internet access. Stay tuned for more information about new PowerBuilder 11.1 features.

PowerBuilder 11 Webcasts

Sign up today for the PowerBuilder 11 Webcast series. These interactive webcasts, each 60 minutes long, will cover the following topics:

• 
  PB 11 Overview - November 20th with Jim O’Neil
• 
  Windows Forms and Interop - December 11th with Jim O’Neil
• 
  Web Forms - December 11th with Dave Fish
• 
  Smart Client - January 15th with John Strano
• 
  Web Services Deployment - January 29th 2008 with Dave Fish
• 
  Web Services DataWindow - February 5th 2008 with Dave Avera

This is also a great opportunity to have your questions answered by PowerBuilder experts, either online during the webcast, or during a live question and answer session at the end of each presentation.

For more information, and the registration form, click here.

Specifying Null Values as Retrieval Arguments in the DataWindow Painter

Some of you have been asking for this enhancement for a long time now. Well its finally here (in version 11.1). You can now have a null value for a retrieval argument in the DataWindow painter.

Just tick the Null check box for any argument where you want the value to be null. If you type in a value, the check box will be cleared.

This enhancement, and several others in PowerBuilder 11 came through the ISUG enhancement request system. Anyone can enter an enhancement request, but only ISUG members can vote. ISUG Memberships are available for as little as US $20, so check it out.

http://www.isug.com/common/EnhancementsProcess.html

Database Driver Enhancements in PowerBuilder 11.1

There are some database driver enhancements in version 11.1. If you are using Informix® 10, Oracle® 10g, or Sybase ASE® 15, read on:

Informix 10 Support:

•The I10 interface supports ANSI/DBCS and Unicode databases

•The I10 interface supports Informix long object names with up to 128 characters

•With IDS 9.2.1 and later, you can change the name of an index in the Database painter when you are connected using the I10 interface

•SQL Statement Caching is Supported

•Creating and dropping indexes without locking

•Column-level encryption is supported

•Using multiple OUT parameters in user-defined routines is supported

Oracle Driver Enhancements:

•Statement caching in Oracle 10g provides and manages a cache of statements for each session

•To set the maximum size of the statement cache, set the StatementCache DBParm to the number of statements you want to cache

–0 (Default) means caching is disabled

•This option is available only in the O10 database interface

Sybase ASE 15 Driver Enhancements:

•In Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.0 and later, you can use the following datatypes as identity columns:

–bigint, int, numeric, smallint, tinyint, unsigned bigint, unsigned int, and unsigned smallint

•This support has been added to both the ASE (introduced in 11.0) and SYC database interfaces

European Events

I'm packing my bags for another trip to Europe. There will be some PowerBuilder 11.1 presentations next week in Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Brussels.

The Frankfurt event will be on the 13th of November at the Sybase office.

The Dusseldorf event will be on the 14th of November at the Sybase office.

In Brussels I will be presenting at the Sybase Symposium on the 15th of November.

If you are interested in attending the events in Frankfurt or Dusseldorf, please send an email to europepb@sybase.com

If you would like to learn more about the Sybase Symposium in Brussels, click here.

All of these events are free. Just let us know that you will be attending so we can order enough food. We wouldn't want you to go hungry!

I'll be racking up the frequent flier miles as I'll come back home for Thanksgiving and then turn around and head back to Europe at the end of this month for some more events. Here is what is happening:

Tuesday, November 27th - Swiss User Group presentation (including hands on training). Click here for more information.

Wednesday, November 28th - Dutch User Group. Details are still being finalized and I'll post the information here when it becomes available, but mark your calendars.

Thursday, November 29th - STUN TechSelect 2007 in London. You can get more information here.

So there are plenty of opportunities for our European customers to learn more about PowerBuilder 11.1 as well as the road map for 11.2, 11.5 and 12 in the next few weeks. If you can't make it one of the European events, don't despair, we will be holding a series of webcasts beginning later this month, each one covering a different aspect of PowerBuilder 11. I'll post the details here as soon as they become available.

Happy Developing!

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.

PowerBuilder 11.1 Coming Soon!

PowerBuilder 11.1 will be released in a little over a week. While maintenance releases are usually not something to get too excited about, this one has some new features that are definitely worth exploring:

1. Enhanced Vista support
2. Data pipeline support for .NET Windows Forms targets
3. Informix 10 Database support
4. New .NET Web Form controls for menus, toolbars and the calendar control
5. Incremental Rebuild for .NET Application Targets
6. Specifying null values as retrieval arguments in the DataWindow painter
7. Statement caching for Oracle 10g
8. Enhanced identity column support for ASE 15
9. Orcascript enhancements
10. Page display properties for RichTextEdit controls
11. Web service client support in Web Forms

11.1 will be a free update for anyone who has PowerBuilder 11. I'll post information on how to download it once it becomes available.

Over the next week I'll be posting in detail about the new or enhanced features in PowerBuilder 11.1 so stay tuned.

Finally, be sure to check out my colleague Jim O'Neil's ISUG webcast on Tuesday November 13th. The topic is creating .NET Assemblies from PowerBuilder NVOs. You can register for it here.