Bruce Armstrong

Enterprise Architecture on Ulitzer John Strano came to Los Angeles on part of the PowerBuilder 12.0 ISUG road show. If you have an opportunity to attend one in your area, run by either John or Dave Fish, they're well worth attending. John demonstrated some impressive new feature... (more)

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 ... (more)

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 chart... (more)

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 ass... (more)

The PowerBuilder 12.0 beta has officially started. It's pretty hard to overstate the magnitude of the changes that are taking place within PowerBuilder for this version. As a result, it's more important than ever for as many people as possible to participate in order to get the m... (more)

(July 25, 2008) - Back in 2002, Sybase announced their four-phase approach toward adding .NET support to PowerBuilder. Phase 1 was the implementation of web services in PB9 and Phase 2 was the release of DataWindow.NET, which was packaged with PB 10. Phases 3 and 4 were the more ... (more)

In the previous articles in this series, we looked at FDCC changes (part 1) and GUI enhancements (part 2) in PowerBuilder 11.5. In this article, we'll be looking at the enhancements that were added to PowerBuilder 11.5 that are specifically related to .NET targets. The one thing ... (more)

There's been a lot of discussion among the .NET folks recently about the magnitude of the changes that are being introduced in the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in .NET 4.0. See, for example, "Windows Workflow Changes Direction" by Kathleen Dollard. It's just another anecdote ... (more)

This is the second part of an ongoing series about the new features that were added in PowerBuilder 11.5. In the first part, we looked at the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) and the impact it had on developers. In this part, we're going to look at a number of the improv... (more)

First, I should explain what I'm referring to. Sybase recently announced that the format of TechWave will be significantly different in 2009 than it has been for the last 10 years. More information is available at the following sites: http://www.sybase.com/techwave http://www.... (more)

I plan to make this the first of a series of articles that discuss the new features in PowerBuilder 11.5, which was released late last year. Of course, they won't be the first articles we've run on the topic, as we ran an article on the new Code Access Security features back even... (more)

Actually, the new IDE doesn't arrive until next year. But I thought we could start talking about it now. In case you didn't make TechWave, any of the PB 11.5 road shows or webcasts, you may not know what's planned for PowerBuilder 12.0. There's a lot that they're talking about al... (more)

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 ... (more)

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 "Cros... (more)

Oracle has provided support for failing over database connections and, through Transparent Application Failover (TAF), doing so in a way that allows connected applications to continue functioning relatively uninterrupted during and after the failover. The connected application ha... (more)

Back in August of 2007, I wrote an article entitled "Dynamically Generating Next-Generation Charts from PowerBuilder DataWindows" that demonstrated one method of dynamically generating Flash charts from within a PowerBuilder application. I was primarily writing that from the pers... (more)

I've been reading "The Future of Management" by Gary Hamel lately. I have a staff of nine developers and, while I believe I'm a pretty good manager, I also believe there is always room for improvement. So I try to keep my eyes and ears open for ways to improve, and reading this b... (more)

Once again I thought this was one of the best TechWaves in years. Better than last year's, which was good. Having my laptop crash on me when I'm scheduled to do four sessions wasn't pleasant and took the edge off of it for me. Otherwise, it might have been a real blast. Location... (more)

Particularly in a means of moving PowerBuilder applications to the web. What I’m looking for doesn’t require a server license or the installation of unmanaged code to the web server, and works well across different browsers (not just Internet Explorer). The WPF DataWindow will he... (more)

As in prior years, the first thing I'll cover is what has changed (assuming that you attended in the past few years). We're back at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Near as I can tell, if you have to be in Las Vegas, this is the place to be. About the only complaint I had last year... (more)