Thursday, November 29, 2018

ISUG TECH Board of Directors 2019-2020 Term Nominations Period

Nominations can be made up through 5PM on December 3rd.

http://my.isug.com/blog/board-of-directors-2019-2020-term-nominations-period

Nominations can be made at:

http://my.isug.com/p/su/rd/survey=84ff36be-f2bd-11e8-b9e7-bc764e10c5fd

Current open positions are:



The election will run from December 24th - 28th, 2016

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Elevate 2018 Report

Summary

This was the second time that Appeon had hosted a PowerBuilder user conference on their own, and once again I thought it went extremely well, even better than the prior year.  As with the prior year, attendance was good and quite diverse.


Monday, August 27, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: PostgreSQL enhancements

The support for PostgreSQL that was added in R2 was covered in an earlier blog post.  The enhancements in R3 are primarily related to addition entries added to the PBODB170.INI file.  These additional entries provide more support for maintaining tables, views, primary and foreign keys, users and groups in the database painter.


Monday, August 20, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: Stand Alone Compiler Enhancements

In an article on the enhancements that were added to the stand alone compiler in R2, I remarked on an issue on how file version information was handled in the initial release, and which was still a problem in R2.  Fortunately, R3 corrects that issue.  In R3, there are now two additional command line arguments:


Saturday, August 18, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: SVN Enhancements

Support for using SVN as a source control system without going through a bridge product was added in 2017 R2 and covered in a previous blog post.  In this blog post we're going to look at the enhancements that were added to that feature in 2017 R3.


Friday, August 10, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: Encryption



PowerBuilder 2017 R3 introduces support for encoding and encrypting data, something of particular interest when using REST web services.  We're going to take a look at those new features.


Thursday, August 09, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: OAuth

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 added a number of REST features, which I covered in a previous blog post.  One area for improvement on the original feature was better support for REST authentication methods.  The HTTPClient and RESTClient objects provided methods to set request headers, but doing the legwork needed for some of the more complex authentication mechanism (i.e., OAuth) were left to the developer.  PowerBuilder 2017 R3 addresses that.  In this blog post we'll look at using this new feature.


Tuesday, August 07, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: JSON Enhancements

There were some JSON features introduced in 2017 R2, in particular the JSONGenerator and JSONParser, which were covered in a previous blog post.  2017 R3 introduces additional important JSON features, in particular JSON import/export from a DataWindow, and a JSONPackage object that is used to merge/extract JSON data sets.  Those will be covered in this blog post.


Thursday, August 02, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: Git Enhancements

Support for using Git as a source control system without going through a bridge product was added in 2017 R2 and covered in a previous blog post.  In this blog post we're going to look at the enhancements that were added to that feature in 2017 R3.


Tuesday, May 29, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R3 New Feature: PDF Enhancements

With the release of PowerBuilder 2017, a new native method of exporting DataWindows to PDF became available.  There were some enhancements added in R2, primarily support for the following:


Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Calling SHGetKnownFolderPath from PowerBuilder

Up through Windows XP, if you wanted to get the physical location of certain defined folders (e.g. the users Documents folder), you would use the SHGetFolderPath function in the Windows API.  Roland Smith has examples of using that on his Topwiz Software site.  That function continues to work in later versions of Windows, although it's basically a wrapper for the SHGetKnownFolderPath function.

SHGetFolderPath uses CSIDL values, whereas SHGetKnownFolderPath uses KnownFolderID GUIDs.  One difference is that there are a lot more KnownFolderIDs than there are CSIDLs.  That means some of the defined folder locations you may want to get the physical location for can't be accessed through the older SHGetFolderPath method.  And that's exactly the situation I ran into.


Thursday, March 15, 2018

More options for connecting PowerBuilder with Git for source control

One of the things that has been hindering PowerBuilder users from adopting Git for source control has been the lack of a MSSCCI provider for Git.  That changed when PB Software released their provider in 2014, although I didn't discover it until 2017 and wrote about it in this blog post.

Of course, one of the new features in PowerBuilder 2017 R2 is native support for Git, so if you're using that version then the lack of a MSSCCI provider for Git is no longer an issue.  However, if you're on an older version of PowerBuilder, you still need such provider.

The good news is that since I wrote that original article another MSSCCI provider for Git has become available.  In September of 2017, the folks who make the Zeus editor and the AgentSVN MSSCCI provider for SVN announced the release of AgentGit, a MSSCCI provider for Git.

I haven't tried this new Git provider yet, but I do use their SCN provider and it's quite solid.  I would expect their Git provider to work equally as well.  They also have a try before you buy option so you can check it out for yourself for free.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 New Feature: Git source control support

In a previous blog article we looked at the new feature of PowerBuilder 2017 R2 for Subversion source control support. In this blog article we're going to look at a very similar feature, Git source control support.  I'm not going to go through the history of source code support in PowerBuilder again, I'd refer you to that previous blog article for that.  We're going dive straight in to how the Git feature works.


Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Running .Net in the Browser

Mentioned Blazor a while back, here's an update:

They've opened up a github repository now.  There's also there's a blog post explaining the status of the project.  Conversely, there's also a somewhat less than enthusiastic independent appraisal of it over on I Programmer.



Tuesday, February 06, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 New Feature: Subversion (SVN) source control support

PowerBuilder's initial support for version control systems required drivers for specific vendors (e.g., PVCS) and often for specific versions of that vendor's products.  It was not unusual to find that you needed to wait to upgrade your source control product until PowerBuilder released an updated driver for it.  And if your source control provider wasn't supported by PowerBuilder you were simply out of luck.


Monday, February 05, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 New Feature: REST

One of the new features added to PowerBuilder 2017 R2 is support for REST web services.  This feature isn't 100% complete, as additional REST functionality is planned for 2017 R3.  There's still a lot in the R2 release to look at though.


Friday, February 02, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 New Feature: Stand Alone Compiler Enhancements

The stand alone compiler was first introduced in PowerBuilder 2017.  It's primarily of interest for shops who perform routine (perhaps daily) builds of their PowerBuilder based applications, usually in order to perform manual and/or automated testing in order to capture bugs as soon as possible after they are introduced into the code base.


Thursday, February 01, 2018

PowerBuilder 2017 R2 New Feature: PostgreSQL support

One of the new features in PowerBuilder 2017 R2 is support for PostgreSQL.  We're going to take a look at using this new (to PowerBuilder) database.