Upcoming PowerBuilder Conferences

I'll be presenting at two PowerBuilder conferences in early 2015.  The sessions I'll be presenting at both are:

• Using Visual Studio.Net Visual Controls in PowerBuilder Classic
• Using Visual Studio.Net Non-Visual Assemblies in PowerBuilder Classic
• Using PowerBuilder Non-Visual Assemblies in Visual Studio.Net
• Using PowerBuilder.Net Visual Controls in Visual Studio.Net

At the Charlotte I'll also be covering New Features in PowerBuilder 12.6.

Both conferences also feature presentations by John Strano and training workshops by Yakov Werde.

Dave Fish will be presenting at Atlanta.

Dirk Boessmann, Senior Vice President of Mobile Development at SAP, will be at Charlotte to discuss SAPs future plans for PowerBuilder

The Charlotte conference is exclusively PowerBuilder.  The Atlanta conference is more like the old TechWaves in that it covers PowerBuilder, but it also covers a number of products including PowerDesigner, ASE, IQ, Rep Server, SQL Anywhere, HANA, SAP Mobile Platform and SAP Fiori.

March 30th to April 1st
Atlanta, Georgia
ISUG-TECH 2015 

The conference covers a variety of SAP products, including PowerBuilder.

• Over 10 PowerBuilder sessions and workshops
• One 4 hour Pre-Conference PowerBuilder training session (Mar 29th).

• Early Registration open now at $1099 (Full Registration is $1499).

May 6th to 8th, 2015
Charlotte, North Carolina
North Carolina PowerBuilder User Group Conference

• Over 25 PB sessions and workshops: Design, mobility, testing, reporting, tips and techniques

• Two days of Pre-Conference Intermediate Training Sessions (May 4 & 5)

• Early Registration open now at $295 (Full Registration is $495)

Summary of the 01/29/15 Latest News from the PowerBuilder World webcast

A recording of the webcast can be found here.

SAP

The first guest speaker was Dirk Boessmann, Senior Vice President of Mobile Development at SAP.   He had a question/answer session with the host, Christophe Dufourmantelle.  Dirk had spoken to the German PowerBuilder User Group in October of 2014 during which time he had a "theoretical discussion" of what options a company like SAP might have in deciding a future for a product like PowerBuilder.

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.