Friday, August 10, 2007

TechWave 2007 - Friday

ISUG Enhancements Session

After the Continental Breakfast and the morning education sessions comes the ISUG Enhancements Session. The enhancements suggested during the session include the following. If there was a response from Sybase during the session, it is indicated as a parenthetical after the suggestion.



  • Want to share connection between PowerScript and .Net code in PowerBuilder 11. (There is a CR open, and it’s planned for PB12 at the latest.)

  • Automatically check out objects that are under source control when they are opened for editing.

  • Ability to do multi-select from system tree

  • Want an event on SQLCA that fires when a database error occurs.

  • Want the equivalent of DataViews

  • Want the environment object to indicate whether it’s running under Vista and if so whether it’s in 32 or 64 bit mode

  • Want a radio button/check box style that spans multiple rows, so that rows can be selected/multi-selected.

  • PBDOM support for .Net targets (perhaps other PBNI extensions as well).

  • DataWindow with OLE object is exported without OLE binary information. If it’s re-imported the reference to the object is lost.

  • Do more of the setup for you for a webform deploy.

  • Better support for handling long text and page breaks in a DataWindow. (DataWindow engine is being rewritten. They are looking at adding an expression to help force page breaking. We can also look at the limitation of the row fitting on a single page during the rewrite. It can’t be fixed in the current implementation of the control though.)

  • Problem with decimal datatypes in DataWindows. They change them to a different datatype, but during a migration to a new version of PowerBuilder the migration changes the datatype back to the original decimal datatype.

  • Advanced search capability in PB6 that doesn’t seem to work in later versions. (Reference to APU, which is available on CodeXchange).

  • RTF edit style for DataWindow column

  • Improve documentation in the help files

  • Want DataWindow source in XML format (It’s already in the new version of the DataWindow, it just wasn't mentioned in the keynotes).

  • Ability to change attributes in the DataWindow that aren’t exposed currently

  • Need to be able to support SetLibraryList in .Net targets. The documentation doesn’t mention it doesn’t work. The workshops indicate that it isn’t supported. The engineers indicate that it does work, but only for PBLs containing only datawindows.

  • Some utility to convert DataWindows back to an older release number, for example PB 11 back to PocketBuilder.

  • Want to be able to generated PDF into memory rather than having to go to a file first.

  • Want PowerBuilder and PowerBuilder to be combined it a single product.

  • Since PowerBuilder does WebForms, put some running samples out there.

  • Support transaction pooling for WebForms (ADO.Net supports this)

  • Provide obscuration utility.

  • Ability to create web services from XSD.

  • PowerBuilder API for third party utilities

  • Ability to import non-datawindows using LibraryImport


There was also a comment that Sybase should do more to reach out to people who develop commercial applications. Finally, there was a mention that a lot of people don’t know about newsgroups (though it wasn't clear if the reference was to the Sybase newsgroups or some that ISUG offers).

Boxed Lunch

Once again a boxed lunch was made available for the last lunch. It's a bit weird this year, because there are still afternoon sessions. I seem to remember there not being additional sessions in the afternoon of the last day in prior years. If there are, I'm thinking that a normal lunch would be in order. On the other hand, the ISUG Enhancements Session went overtime, and so I just grabbed mine and went back into that session. There was also supposed to be an ISUG meeting during the lunch break, but I couldn't make that because I stayed in the Enhancement Session. Perhaps there wasn't an ISUG Meeting given that all the ISUG people were in the Enhancement Sessions, but I don't recall any announcements to that effect.

Deploying a Client/Server Application to .Net WinForms - Step by Step

Another interesting session. Not packed out but still well attended considering that the conference is in shut down mode.

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