Bruce Armstrong

One of the main issues that PowerBuilder and PowerBuilder developers have been facing for the last few years is the lack of mind share for the product. Interest in PowerBuilder - as measured by news articles in Google's archive - ramped up from its inception in 1991 until it hit its peak in 1996 with the release of PowerBuilder 5.0. It dropped a bit off the peak but remained steady until it peaked again in 2003 with the release of PowerBuilder 9.0 and PocketBuilder 1.0. It's been dropping steadily since then though, with the current activity about that of 1993. A look at Google trends also shows the rapid decline in search activity since 2004 (as far back as Trends has data). That is most likely the reason in the last year or so that PowerBuilder keeps dropping off the ... (more)

Using the Microsoft Chart Controls in PowerBuilder

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 capability to PowerBuilder applications. As a .NET visual control we should be able to use it "natively" wi... (more)

Supporting Events from .NET Visual Components in PowerBuilder

This article seems like it should be the fourth in a series of articles. The first two were on non-visual components in August 2006 and July of 2007. The last one was in August of 2007. In that one, we looked at using the Interop Forms Toolkit to provide a COM wrapper for Visual .NET components - essentially making them ActiveX controls - so that PowerBuilder could use them. That article... (more)

PowerBuilder Editorial: Hi, I’m Mort from Ort...

Back in March of 2004, Eric Lippert of Microsoft explained in his "Fabulous Adventures In Coding" blog how Microsoft divides the developer community into three groups, each which is designated by a personality. Apparently, this is a practice recommended by Geoffrey Moore in "Crossing the Chasm". The three personalities are: Elvis: The professional application developer Einstein: The expert... (more)

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Some Code...?

PBDJ - PowerBuilder Journal PowerBuilder fans have been sharing code with one another since...well at least since the beginning days of CompuServe in the early 1990s. When PowerBuilder users gathered in just a single section in a general interest programming forum, we had an associated file library section, and when we moved to our own PowerSoft forum we had a series of file libraries. T... (more)