Haiti Missions Trip 2014

Monday, December 15th

Arrived in Haiti at 9 AM after 9 hours of flying (including layover).  Went directly to the compound at Blanchard and rested for a bit.  One of the first thing I notice is that they've sealed the windows in the guest rooms with plastic and have installed mini-split (ductless) air conditioners.

The results from the 2014 PowerBuilder Survey are available

2014 Survey Results

Some of my own observations:

The adoption rate for PowerBuilder 12 seems to have been more rapid than for previous versions of PowerBuilder (at least 9 and later).

And it kills me that 6 of the 8 most desired new features for the PowerBuilder Classic IDE were provided in the PowerBuilder.Net IDE.  I think most PB developers don't know what they're missing out on.

There are also a lot of comments included at the end of the survey.  I haven't gone through them all yet myself.

PowerBuilder product manager leaves SAP

Sue Dunnell, a Director of Product Management for SAP (primarily for PowerBuilder), has left to join Infosys.   Sue originally worked in as a Technical Support engineer with Sybase.  After four years, she took over as Director of Product Management in 2000.  She continued with in that role with SAP when SAP acquired Sybase.  Sue was primarily known for her work shepherding the PowerBuilder product line.  At this time, a replacement has not been named.  

Highlights from VSCONNECT - Day Two

One other announcements from Day One that got overshadowed by some of the major announcements.

Visual Studio 2015 Preview is available, which includes:

•    a preview of .Net 2015
•    a preview of ASP.Net 5
•    an Android emulator for Visual Studio.

A pretty good summary of the preview is available here.

This slide was shown in a discussion of ASP.Net 5, but it's applicable to the broader .Net development environment.  The middle column represents the layers.  The left column represents .Net development prior to the VSCONNECT announcements.  The right column represents .Net development after the VSCONNECT announcements.

Note that platform specific sections of .Net are not being open sources (i.e., WPF).

Here's another important diagram from the announcements.

Which is a lot more comforting to .Net developers than their last rather famous diagram from Build in 2011.

There's some pretty good analysis of the announcements on iProgrammer here and here.

Highlights from VSCONNECT - Day One

While most people were watching a EAS land a probe on a comet, I was watching the first day of VSCONNECT.   It was a bit of information overload, but here's the main things I got:

• Future versions of the .Net Framework will be named based on the year they are released.  For example, the next version will be called .Net 2015.
  
• The source code for the .Net Framework will be open sourced.  The core portions of it are already available on Microsoft's GitHub server.
  
• The core .Net Framework has been ported to Linux and OSX.
  
• A new edition of VS.Net, called the community edition is now available free of charge to individual developers and small development groups.  It is not an express version of VS, but a full featured version that can be used for production development   Licensing is only required for "enterprise use".

More details on the announcements in day one can be found here and here.  Recordings of the webcast can be found here.

During the "halftime show" there were a lot of questions about the future of WPF.  That has been responded to in a blog post here.

Deploying PowerBuilder apps to desktops and mobile devices using Microsoft RemoteApp

Microsoft has recently announced a new feature of Windows Azure called RemoteApp that allows Windows applications to be hosted on Azure and then run via RDP on the desktop as well as mobile devices, including iOS and Android devices.  We're going to look to see how well that works for a PowerBuilder application.

Creating a REST web service using PowerBuilder.Net 12.5

One of the new features introduced with PowerBuilder.Net 12.5 was the ability to create WCF web services.  The version of the product also introduced a client for REST web services as well, and a WCF client had been introduce in an earlier version.  One frequent question I heard when presenting the new features in conference or online sessions was when PowerBuilder.Net would provide the capability to create REST services, not just consume them.

Perhaps what few people realized (including myself at the time) is that WCF web services isn't just for creating SOAP services.  Since .Net 3.0, they have been capable of creating REST services as well.  So we've actually have had the capability to create REST web services with PowerBuilder.Net since 12.5 was released.  In this blog post we'll look at how we do that.