Jolt Awards

Sybase SQL Anywhere is a finalist in CMP Technology's Dr. Dobb's 17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards

TechWave 2007

Sybase will once again be holding its annual TechWave conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, this time at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, August 6-10th.

Visit http://www.sybase.com/techwave for the most recent information on TechWave 2007!

TechWave 2007

Well, I was wrong. I was hoping that it would move out of Las Vegas. It moved, but just to a different hotel. Mark your calendars for August 6th to 10th.

DataWindow.Net 2.5 Beta is open

New features include:

DataWindow Designer Visual Studio Plug-in
This is a set of plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It gives users the ability to design DataWindow objects directly in Visual Studio instead of in the standalone DataWindow Designer from the previous versions. The standalone DataWindow Designer will not be distributed with DataWindow .NET 2.5.

No more 80% solutions…

It may be a bit early, but I have a New Year's resolution I'd like to propose to Sybase: "No more 80% solutions."

What is an 80% solution? It's a technology approach that seems well conceived and when used with small demonstration applications (e.g., beta testing) works well. However, when the product is released and people begin using it in earnest to develop larger 'real-world' applications they end up hitting walls. The walls were always there. However, because the people involved in testing it weren't trying to actually develop 'real-world' applications with it during the testing phase, the walls weren't discovered and addressed during the development of the technology. Or perhaps they were even surfaced by individual beta testers, but they never reached critical mass because not enough people recognized the looming problem.

10.5.1 is finally out

And it contains a number of new features. A couple I'm particular fond of.

• New properties for spell checking support - The SelectedStartPos and SelectedTextLength properties allow you to use a supported ActiveX control to spell check text in PowerBuilder rich text controls. Supported spell checking controls include VSSpell from ComponentOne and WSpell from Wintertree Software.


• PowerBuilder 10.5.1 includes support for custom SOAP headers in .NET Web services. This support was introduced in PowerBuilder 10.5 EBF 5034.

I'm working on samples of doing both that I'll post on Sybase's CodeXchange site once they're available.

Update: The sample of using the custom security header option to call eBay is here.

Maybe there’s hope for non-Microsoft / Java IDEs after all…

After months of talks with potential suitors, Borland decided not to sell off the tools division, but to spin it off instead. (On a unrelated note though, Borland also just recieved a delisting notice from NASDAQ). I'm happy about the spin off decision though. Not that I'm particularly fond of their tools (I've tried a number including Delphi and JBuilder, but didn't stick with them). But I take it as a sign that there is still room in the market for development tools that aren't either open source or from Microsoft.