Special pre-order pricing for PowerBuilder 2017

Pre-orders for PowerBuilder are available from now through December 31, 2016 at reduced prices.

ISUG-TECH board member nominations now open

The nomination period is open until 5PM PST November 30th.  Elections will be held December 5th to 9th 2016.  Any member may nominate another member to serve; however, only regular (paid) members may vote in the election.

The following positions are open for a two year term (2017-2018):

• Vice President of Finance
• Vice President of Membership
• Regional Director - North America
• Regional Director - EMEA
• Communications Director
• Social Media Director

Only current board members are eligible to run for either of the Vice President positions.  The list of current board members can be found at http://my.isug.com/board/members.

There are are also two open positions available for the remainder of the 2016-2017 term.

• Regional Director - AP
• Benefits DIrector

Those two positions can be appointed by the current board.  If you are interested in either of those positions or want to recommend someone, please contact one of the current board members.

Another Microsoft "Next Big Thing" technology bites the dust

This time it's LightSwitch.  Two months ago it was RemoteApp.  It must really give .Net developers a lot of second thoughts when the next "big thing" is announced.

I just find this ironic

Remember Steve Job's "Thoughts on Flash"?  Remember the closing statement?

"Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

This just in.  A company called Nexedi is suing Apple.  For what?

"The primary reason for starting this lawsuit is because we hope that it will help Apple to sooner support the latest Web and HTML5 standards on its iOS platform - the operating system used by all iPhones.  Anyone running html5test (http://html5test.com/) on his iPhone will find out that current iOS support of HTML5 Web technologies is lagging behind other platforms."

Preparing PowerBuilder applications for submission to the Windows Store using the Desktop App Converter

What the Desktop App Converter does is create a UWP wrapper around a .Net or Win32 application.  It runs the application within an isolated Windows environment so that any elevated privileges only affect the isolated environment and not the host machine.

Accessing any database from PowerBuilder 12.6 using OData

OData

One of the new features added to PowerBuilder Native with the 12.6 release was support for accessing SQL databases through OData.  A number of database vendors, particularly SAP and Microsoft provide build in support for exposing their databases via OData.  However, what do you need to do if you want to access other databases such as IBM or Oracle?

There are a number of options.  One is to get something like the Progress DataDirect OData Connector or the CData Could Driver.  Another approach, recommended by IBM and Oracle, is to expose the database through WCF Data Services using Visual Studio.Net.  The problem with that approach is that Microsoft (as it often does) has indicated that WCF Data Services has been deprecated in favor of Web API OData libraries.  So instead, we're going to look at a third option, using platform neutral open-source tools to expose any database through an OData service.

Recap of PowerBuilder Future Webcast 5

The recording of the webcast is available at:  www.appeon.com/recordings  The following is my summary of what was discussed.