Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Elevate 2022

 Intro

As with Elevate 2021, Elevate 2022 was online only and free. One major difference this year is that there wasn't a call for papers.  Instead, I believe Appeon reached out to a number of the regular presenters from prior years and asked them to present at this years event.

Monday, September 26, 2022

Some interesting COM controls that can be used in PowerBuilder

They've been available for a while, it's just that I only recently stumbled across them.  Check out Exontrol   I particularly noticed their Gantt controls.  In one of our PowerBuilder based applications we were using a different third-party Gantt ActiveX.  The original vendor left the market quite some time ago.  We had purchased the C++ source code while they were still in business and had some some minor mods to it.  However, we we decided to migrated the application to 64 bit we opted to do away with the Gantt functionality rather than trying to take on the task of converting the ActiveX to 64 bit.  All of the controls shown on the Excontrol page come in both 32 and 64 versions, so that is not an issue with their controls.

Tuesday, August 09, 2022

A way to extract the PowerBuilder runtime files from the MSI created by the PowerBuilder runtime packager

 I'm old school, so I still like to deploy the PowerBuilder runtimes with the PowerBuilder application.  The PowerBuilder runtime packagers doesn't do loose files, it either creates a single MSI or MSM file.  So, to date, what I end up doing is checking the PowerBuilder Runtime Files section of the PowerBuilder documentation and cherry picking off the files I need.

Fortunately though, there's a new utility available in the Windows Store call MSI Viewer that does a bit more than just view the contents of an MSI file.  In particular, it allows you to extract the original files from the MSI file.  Now I can use the runtime packages to generate an MSI with the files I need and then use MSI Viewer to extract the files back out again to package with my app.


A nice little utility for determine the version(s) of .Net Framework are installed

 It's called DotNetVersions.  Run it at the command line and it will report out the .Net Framework versions found on the system.  No more having to dig through the registry.

https://github.com/jmalarcon/DotNetVersions

Thursday, June 23, 2022

One of the new features in Windows 10 that seems to have escaped me until now

 Seems that with Windows 10, Microsoft finally gave us a buffer for cut/paste operations.  Thing it, it's not enabled by default.  To enabled it, press the Windows key and V on your keyboard.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/clipboard-in-windows-c436501e-985d-1c8d-97ea-fe46ddf338c6


An updated version of Dependency Walker

 Dependency Walker was one of those tools that was invaluable for determining which runtime DLLs you application needed or was missing.  Unfortunately, it hasn't really be updated to keep up with modern versions of Windows.  Fortunately, there is an open source project out there called Dependancies that addresses that deficiency:

https://github.com/lucasg/Dependencies