Thursday, August 31, 2006

Special Event

I did get some feedback on the Special Event. Actually, the hit of the night was apparently SyberJam



A band composed of Sybase employees and TeamSybase members. The played during the pre-event while the food was being served.
The main event was Penn and Teller. Here's some photos of them from after the event.



Photos are courtesy of Paul Horan. Here's one last one of his, a view of the pools at Ceaser's from his room.



Friday, August 11, 2006

Thursday’s Sessions

    Services are the keys to reuse

My last session. Jeff Pryslak was doing most of the talking, I was just the "demo doll" (the guy showing the live example). Only suffered a minor piece of demo curse this time. I deployed a component and forget to recycle the server, so the component crashed intermittently during that portion of the demo. Everything else ( including live calls to the Amazon and eBay web services ) worked fine. Quite a few poeple in attendance.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Wednesday’s Session

Advanced DataWindow.Net

Start off first thing in the morning with the Advanced DataWindow.Net class that I'm assisting Dave Fish with. Somewhat of a mixed bag, Dave did a lot of discussion of the new features from PowerPoints. One of the Sybase engineers responsible for the ongoing development of the Web DataWindow did those demos, and so was able to speak to great detail about how it operated. Dave then showed the DataWindow Designer plug-in for Visual Studio. One of the engineers responsible for it's development was also in attendance. Unfortunately, that demo didn't work that well (not suprisingly considering it was a pre-alpha build).

Tuesday’s Session

I was still proctoring the PB 10.5/PB 11 new features class. Unfortunately, the instructor created the PB 11 demo code using a post-beta 1 build of PB11, and the machines in the lab had beta 1 builds. So the lab machines couldn't run the demos. To correct that, the instructor downloaded an even more recent post-beta 1 build, which resulted in the machines failing differently, but failing nonetheless to run the samples. Other than that, the session went well. The issue of demos not going well seem to be a re-occurring theme.

Tuesday's after lunch dessert was served in the exhibit hall. Once again, it seems an effective means of ensuring the people visited the exhibit hall. I think it also made the environment more relaxed as well.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Tuesday’s Keynotes

Data keynote

Raj Nathan discussed data as the foundation of business, and how that data needed to be unwired from applications so the right data can be delivered to the right point at the right time. Another Customer Panel (Scott Smith - ComScore, Ron Hauper - EMC, Scott Denmark - AOL, Staffan Skogby - Ericsson) then discussed their successes in data management and their needs for the future. Ifran then discussed the roadmap for the data management products and Rob V. did a demo of cluster failover.

Mike Harold, ISUG President, and Raj then presented the ISUG awards. This year the awards were based on votes from ISUG Journal readers voting for their favorite articles. In the database category, the award went to Jeff Wallman. In the tools category there were two winners as a result of a tie: Ken Howe and Paul Vero.

Tools keynote

Bill Jacobs introducted the session. Then Raj discussed the roadmap for tools products. John Strano did a demonstration of the XAML DataWindow. Dave Dichman discussed plans for PowerDesigner and the latest version was demoed. Jonathan Baker then discussed the plans for Workspace and Jeff Pryslak did a demo of the latest version. Bill then finished the session by noting that Sybase has opened up a blogs section where a number of the key people in the database and tools sections are posting.
Photos are here.

Video of the demonstrations are here.


Monday, August 07, 2006

Monday Session

I was originally planning on attending the .Net Interop in PB11 class.  However, due to a bit of a snafu Sybase thought I was an employee and scheduled me to proctor the New Features in PB 10.5 / 11.0 class.  It was actually quite encouraging to know that the class was held twice (once prior to this during the pre-conference classes) and yet it was booked to capacity (100+ people).

Sponsor Reception - Exhibit Hall

Monday evening after the sessions is when the Exhibit Hall opened for the first time.  The Sponsor Reception means that food and drink were offered in the exhibit hall to draw more people in.  It certainly worked.

My pictures of the sponsor reception are here.

Â

Monday’s Keynotes

John Chen thanked ISUG and TeamSybase for being here. He then thanked the event sponsors. He noted that keynote was being webcast live and made disclaimers. He also noted that board of directors are attending the event and meeting the customers.

Five Growth Areas
Explosive Data Growth
Wireless Access Ubiquity
Proliferation of Mobile Devices
Demand for Real Time Information
SOA + Mobility Development Paradigm


Showed the “butterfly slide” that shows the intersection (theme for this event) between Information Management and Information Mobility

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Friends of ISUG Dinner

ISUG had a dinner for "friends" who have supported ISUG or local user groups over the last year.  It was held in the Cafe Logo in Ceaser's Palace.  Pictures are here.

Test your IQ Gameshow

A bit different format this time.  Two ISUG board members join with three TeamSybase members to face off against Sybase staff.  And rather than having to come up with the answer from scratch, we were allowed to select from a list of anywhere from 3 to 5 possible answers.  This time the ISUG/TeamSybase team managed to squeak out a win over the Sybase team.

Pictures are here

Video is here

Š

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Welcome to TechWave 2006

I'm here a bit early because TeamSybase has their own reception Saturday evening.  TeamSybase initiated a couple of new members.  Here's some video from the super secret initiation ceremony.

According to the Newswave, there are 1,600 attendees this year.  Here's a picture of the logo welcoming everyone to Techwave.  That backpack in front of it is the one you get when you register.  It's interesting that the middle of the three sponsor logos on the backpack is Microsoft, but I don't see Microsoft represented elsewhere.

Here's some of my other general photos from TechWave. 

Â

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Calling Dot Net Components from PowerBuilder via COM wrappers

I used to implement SMTP for PowerBuilder using a PBNI class that used P.J. Naughter's CPJNSMTPConnection MFC class to do the heavy lifting. Well, .Net 2.0 changes all that. One of the new features of .Net 2.0 is the introduction of an SMTPClient class. One of the features of .Net since it was introduced was the ability for non-.Net applications to call .Net components through the use of a COM Callable Wrapper (CCW).

I'm going to demonstrate how to use a CCW to utilize the new SMTPClient class in .Net 2.0. The first thing we'll need to do is create our own .Net component that uses the new class. We'll start by creating a Class Library using Visual Studio.Net 2005. Note that although I haven't tried it personally, I believe everything that I'm doing is possible with Visual C# Express.