Paul Harvey, the great American radio personality, would always conclude his colorful broadcasts with the quip “And now you know the rest of the story.” For those of you not acquainted with Paul’s broadcasts, here’s a sample. If you get to about 3:40 in, you’ll hear the classic remark....

As we all know, the DataWindow is a very powerful and flexible control used for data presentation and manipulation. For the most part, the features that you get out of the box allow you to create some very impressive applications. With that said, there is always room for improvement. F...

Yesterday I taught an intro to PowerBuilder .NET 12.5 session. Part of the presentation had me comparing the.NET IL code inside an assemblies generated from code written in C# and PowerBuilder. The C# code, after performing a simple arithmetic calculation echoed results to the cons...

Your application has a window containing custom visual user objects (CVUOs) that require system services in their constructor events. Obviously, the services must be resident and active before the CVUO constructor is invoked. Using globals (functions, or NVO references) is one approach...

With all the attention in PB12 focused on .NET and WPF, some of you may be wondering about the future of Win32 targets in what is now being called PB Classic. Those hoping to still continue to work with Win32 targets in PB Classic can rest assured, PB Classic is not going away and we a...

This week PBDJ will publish part one of a series of articles I am writing called “PowerBuilder .NET RESTful Web Services: A quick-start how-to guide”. I’m also producing an accompanying video demo series. To get the buzz going here's a release candidate for the complete video that w...

Not sure when this sneaked in... I was working on some new DataWindow object courseware with version 12.1 last week when I stumbled onto this little change. For those of you with a penchant for using the Messagebox function for debugging, you might find this interesting Used to be...

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...

Application partitioning is a hot topic lately. If you’ve been following my articles in this publication and in ISUG Journal, you are no doubt beginning to get the picture of what application partitioning is all about. You now know that an application has three logical layers: user int...

I’ve written a number of articles in the past on using .NET components, both visual and non-visual, from a PowerBuilder “Classic” (i.e., Win32) application. Until now, all of them involved using a .NET component that was either provided in the .NET Framework or created using Visual Stu...

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...

This article will focus on the upgrade process from AllFusion Harvest Change Manager R7.1 to CA Software Change Manager (SCM) R12.0.2. I am writing this article because I recently went through this process and felt it would be beneficial to share this experience with other users in the...

I taught a full day .NET seminar to an ISUG group in Minneapolis today. 19 developers attended. During the migration unit I demo'd and showed how mapped custom events, not on the control supported list, are migrated BUT, during compile, do not generate a warning. Even worse at runtime ...

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...

This article will focus on the PowerBuilder Build Process using E. Crane Computing product PowerGen with CA Software Change Manager (SCM) R12.0.2. I am writing this article because we recently upgraded to SCM R12 and it was a good time to visit our PowerBuilder build process and see wh...

In PowerBuilder, an event is used as a place to put code in reaction to something. The .NET world uses events differently and, in my opinion, more appropriately. In .NET, an event is just notification that something happened. This lets other objects react to changes while PowerBuilder’...

How I discovered that migrating to .NET is strikingly similar to n-tiered and web migration. started yesterday when I was researching and writing content for a PB .NET migration article while in the county courthouse jury room (yes there was wireless access) waiting to be called to s...

How to realize the full worth of PowerBuilder to .NET migration. GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) "A fundamental goal of legacy Information System migration is that the new system not become a legacy system itself" These insightful words were written seventeen years ago by Michael L. ...

Illustrates a time and effort saving technique when migrating Classic apps the reference external custom DLLs. One difference when migrating Classic Apps between the WinForm/WebForm and WPF is how you need to handle listing referenced DLLs during the migration process. In .NET the de...

I'll show you how to control the contents of the unsupported features list in the OutPut window of the Visual Studio IDE. I recently migrated a Classic MDI application to .NET. One of the nice features that helped me prepare my code for .NET deployment is the Unsupported Feature list...

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...

If you don’t know the words to this classic folk song, here they are: Oh, the old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, Ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, Many long years ago. I can’t count how many times I hea...

A cumulative compilation of links to all the free eLearning content I have created for Sybase to date

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 ...

One of the things that PowerBuilder developers have been asking for years is the ability to include state-of-the-art graphic elements in their applications. With the advent of WPF Targets in PowerBuilder.NET 12.0, that capability has finally arrived. You can do quite a bit with the n...

There are certain authors whose books I look forward to reading because they don't just repackage a manual but offer practical real-work examples and advice. One such author is Scott Mitchell. He has revised his previous version of this book to encompass ASP.NET 4 . This book is well w...

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...

Since version 9, PowerBuilder has provided the ability to create front-end clients functioning in a service-oriented architecture application via Web service interface technology. Originally the ability was based on the open source EasySOAP driver. In version 10.5 it was expanded to us...

A common Classic PB code technique when modifying the displayed contents of window controls, is to turn off screen refresh by calling SetRedraw( false ), performing the update activity and then calling SetRedraw (true). Setredraw( ) is one of those graphic object methods that falls by...

One significant way that .NET migration differs from all others that came before it. It started off by me wondering, why is there is no version 12 .NET migration assistant like the one in previous versions? Then it dawned on me. The migration process is its own assistant! Here's what ...

The new PowerBuilder 12.NET product utilizes the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) feature of the .NET framework version 3.5 that now allows the PB application developer to assign either Window or Application based "Skins". The skin is an XML style that can be applied to all co...

There’s a lot of “legacy” PowerBuilder code that you might want to access from .NET applications or perhaps PowerBuilder has some superior functionality that you would like to make use of in a .NET application. Think about how easy it would be to create a report in PowerBuilder with a ...

In a 2002 NTA Monitor survey, it was found that the typical intensive computer user had, on average, 21 passwords. This includes everything from a PIN number on a bank card to a Windows password to their personal e-mail. Password fatigue is the phenomenon of feeling overwhelmed by the ...

When I first accepted the assignment to write a tutorial about refactoring code, I was sure that refactoring was something that developers did when ‘extreme' requirements hit their application. Like when, management wanted to move the entire app to the web or extract the business logi...

Today, Sybase posted a video tutorial on TDD and Refactoring with pbUnit as part of their free developer migration support series. I welcome you to check it out. Nowadays, every platform has an xUnit based open source unit testing tool. Just today, I discovered that there is one for Ad...

Those who answer to users probably agree that the style of the PowerBuilder applications have remained unchanged for far too long. While major improvements are anticipated with the release of the PowerBuilder 12 beta, developers who would like a quick face-lift for their applications a...

The latest development technologies rely on intermediate languages and can be decompiled. PowerBuilder is no exception. In this article, we will address the risks posed by decompilers. We will also discuss what can be done to protect against the possible negative results of decompilati...

More than a decade ago Chuck Weger coined the term “preflight” to define the verification process of digital files prior to printing. Since then, this process or “check list” has materialized into integrated PDF options, plug-ins, and standalone products.

You may not be aware of this, but Microsoft now provides a rather powerful charting control free of charge as an add-in for .NET 3.5. It’s available for download at http://xrl.us/ben3pm. Because it supports 35 different chart types (see Figure 1), it can add significant new charting ca...