PowerBuilder 12.5 introduced a number of significant enhancements to web services support, both for creation and consumption. We’re going to look at what those new features provide and how to use them. We’re also going to look at how we can package some of that functionality so that ...

Is MapReduce the Holy Grail answer to the pressing problem of processing, analyzing and making sense of large and growing data volumes? Certainly it has potential in this arena, but there is a distressing gap between the amount of hype this technology – and its spinoffs – has received ...

Part 2 of "RESTful Web Services: A Quick-Start How-To Guide" explores foundational issues in coding RESTful operations, including Basic Authentication and Exception handling. Along the way I’ll share with you multiple real-world coding tips and workarounds. As a teenager, one of my fa...

Finding the perfect balance of influence between IT and the Business Owners (I will resist the urge to refer to them as B.O.) is not easy. I usually find that most projects are influenced by one or the other in an unbalanced manner. The story is usually goes like this... The business...

Among PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET’s new features comes the ability to use WCF to call RESTful web services. This article, the first in a two-part series, provides a PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET developer with the foundational knowledge and skills to rapidly get up and running building PowerBuilde...

I’ve been programming since around 1982, first using an Apple in high school and then finally getting my first computer, the Timex Sinclair 1000 (2k of ROM and 2k of RAM), that same year. Both computers came with a form of the BASIC programming language and it was the start of my lifel...

This is the second part of a two-part article. In the last article we learned how to use the tag property to create our own microhelp and automate it. In this article we are going to go one step further and use the tag property for other things. The list of items that I used the tag p...

An enterprise without a modernization strategy is an enterprise with a painful future of paying technical debt with the highest interest possible. This is especially true of custom-developed applications. Software changes, period. So why not include a strategy for change in your enter...

Part 1 of the Windows Azure Series, provided an introduction to Windows Azure, and Part 2 provided a look inside the Windows Azure datacenters. Part 3 will continue with a look at the Windows Azure Roles and the Development Environment. The last one is especially important for the next...

If you’re familiar with the Database Binary / Text Large Object column type in PowerBuilder Classic (see Figure 1), you know it’s a way of storing blob data associated with an OLE Automation application (Paint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel) and then displaying it as part of a DataWi...

There are all kinds of pies, chicken pot pie, shepherd’s pie, cherry pie and of course good ol’ American apple pie. Every host or hostess knows that pies are perfect circles. There are infinite ways to divide and serve them. They can be cut in halves, thirds, quarters, eighths, sixteen...

Increasingly, IT managers, CIOs and software developers are turning to a new approach for rapidly building robust database applications without programming - application generators. Today’s business environment demands managers find ways to do more with less, and application generation...

One of the main goals of PowerBuilder Classic application refactoring is to divide the code into logical partitions. Although you will likely not gain significant performance increases in exchange for your efforts, you will achieve two other highly significant gains. First, your logic ...

The most agile project teams I have seen are those that do not claim to be agile or lean. They have a solid well documented architecture in place as well as designs of the modules being built. They have separated the responsibilities amongst the team members according to the team membe...

Part of the allure of the .NET platform is that all code, no matter what language or grammar it’s written in, compiles down to Common Intermediate Language (CIL) that is managed and executed by the Common Language Runtime (CLR). PowerScript code goes through a two-step process before b...

XAML data binding is a codeless (declarative) way of transferring information from one object to another. It’s very helpful in a UI where data originating in one object controls a characteristic of (or is the source of data displayed in) another object. Data binding’s main benefit is t...

A great agile team is a highly disciplined team. Embracing new levels of discipline consistently across teams is tough without guidance and continual feedback. Wouldn’t it be great to have an experienced Agile Development Coach entrenched into every single one of your project teams? Th...

When Sybase originally released PowerBuilder 10.0, one of the new features they added with that version was the PowerDesigner plug-in. There had been a number of IDE “add-in” third-party products for PowerBuilder before (e.g, SmartPaste, SmartJump), but this was the first time that Syb...

While there is literature describing how to use .NET controls in PB (see for example, past issues of this magazine), all are silent on how to set control properties at runtime and how to persist them. This article will address both issues. Like regular OLE controls, you can allow you...

Clips or snippets are pieces of code that are either difficult to remember or often used with minor tweaks. Developers look for ways to leverage their IDE to write code snippets once and then paste them into an editor whenever / wherever they are needed. In Classic the IDE facility is ...

Back in my younger days, I could run a sub seven-minute mile. When I heard about somebody running a five-minute mile, I thought “now that’s really fast.” Today, the world record for the mile run is 3:43:13, set in 1999 by Hicham El Guerrouj from Morocco. In the ’80s, IT projects f...

A cloud service in Windows Azure will typically have multiple concurrent instances. Each instance may be running all or a part of the service’s codebase. As a developer, you control the number and type of roles that you want running your service. Windows Azure roles are comparable to...

As software developers, our mission is to deliver positive, technology-based solutions – software that provides both the means and the method for working faster, performing better, achieving more. There is little doubt that the technologies we create provide users with the control and ...

The Windows Azure platform is an Internet-scale cloud computing services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. Windows tools provide functionality to build solutions that include a cloud services operating system and a set of developer services. The key parts of the Windows Azure ...

There has been some talk lately about the impact of the new .NET PBL and EXE format on applications that dynamically integrate InfoMaker reports (or other external PBLs). The concern is that since PowerBuilder has gone .NET and InfoMaker remains Classic, platform differences will break...

I grew up in a Brooklyn NY apartment building. As a young kid, one of my rainy day after-school pastimes was playing card games with the other kids in my building. One of the games we played was crazy eights. If you’re curious about this simple card game, check out the Wikipedia descri...

Of course Microsoft has their own Cloud hosting services, Azure, but there are still other scenarios where Microsoft software can be Cloud deployed, and these offer a fertile product development area for web hosting providers. These 'Microsoft Cloud Services' (MCS) offer the ideal way...

The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. In my previous articles (“Refactoring Is Not an ‘R’ Word, [PBDJ, Vol. 16, issue 12] and “Refactoring Classic PowerBuilder Applications Using TDD and pbUnit” [PBDJ, Vol. 17, issue 1) you read why refac...

What is an event? Generally speaking, an event is an occurrence that brings about significant change in the state of an object from a certain point of view. For example, the “sunrise” is an event that is defined from the perspective of an earthling. Yet from the perspective of an alien...

For many releases of PB Classic, the object painters allowed the user to open views to see various parts of the edited object, such as Layout, and Control List. This feature allowed for each view to be customized to its contents, but it also meant that you really never had a complete s...

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is shipping the next version of the popular ASP.NET MVC Framework with its IDE. A year ago I blogged about my findings when getting my hands on the first version of ASP.NET MVC. The MVC Framework provides really nice features that make it very easy to...

After my recent presentation at TSSJS – Performance Anti-Patterns in AJAX Applications - I got interesting feedback from one of the attendees: “The presentation was good but I thought you are talking more about actual problems with XHR/AJAX Requests”. I have to admit that I focused on ...

SharePoint is without question a fast-growing platform and Microsoft is making lots of money with it. It’s been around for almost a decade and grew from a small list and document management application into an application development platform on top of ASP.NET using its own API to mana...

The long-predicted demise of the mainframe is about as likely as the paperless office. In fact, the analogy is appropriate, because companies are reducing their reliance on both paper and on mainframes, for the same reasons: achieving better results and saving money. That the mainfr...

As for the right name, what more need be said than that Cloud Computing has caught on in a way that "Grid Computing" or "Utility Computing" or "Elastic Computing" never did? As a metaphor is sums up perfectly the spirit of compute capacity that can be set up and torn down programati...

The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. The first article in this series will explain why refactoring code before migration can help ensure a smoother migration process and a post-migration enterprise integration effort. It will introduce t...

Any new technology adoption happens because of one of the three reasons: Capability: It allows us to do something which was not feasible earlier Convenience: It simplifies Cost: It significantly reduces cost of doing something What is our expectation from cloud computin...

Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years.  Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) lo...

According to a Smart Enterprise Magazine CIO report, three-quarters of today's CIOs help their companies develop new products or services. Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." ...