SAP Mentor Monday - March 3rd, 2014

Please join us for our first series of SAP Mentor Monday webinars with the SAP Startup Focus program on March 3rd 2014.

Your Favorite PowerBuilder.TV Presenters Live!

SAP will be showing the latest PowerBuilder roadmap and will answer questions on current and future plans for the product at both Charlotte and Atlanta. Also, get a look at PowerBuilder 15! 

Charlotte PowerBuilder Conference  March 5-7, Charlotte, North Carolina

See live presentations and ask questions to some of your favourite PBTV presenters, including:

• Dave Fish
• Matt Balent
• Chris Pollach
• Yakov Werde
• Armeen Mazda
• Christophe Dufourmantelle
• Gian Luca DeBonis

The CPBC brings together many of the top application and database developers from the PowerBuilder world to Charlotte for a three day 100% PowerBuilder event to spur innovation, share insight, and foster collaboration. 

ISUG-TECH 2014 Conference April 14-17, Atlanta, Georgia

This conference covers a variety of SAP database, mobile and application products. It includes a number of PowerBuilderTV favorites and others presenting on topics of interest to PowerBuilder developers, including:

• Ronnie Po
• Armeen Mazda
• Filiberto Sosa
• Bruce Armstrong
• Yakov Werde
• Dave Fish
• Brian Le Suer

Early bird registration ends February 28!

PowerBuilder.TV sessions for late Feb / March

Stored Procedure DataWindow Objects in PB 12.5 Classic and .NET: Basics and Tips & Tricks - Yakov Werde

February 27, 2014 (Thursday) at 9:00 AM PST (Los Angeles) 6.00 PM CET (Paris)

In conjunction with eLearnIT's upcoming North Carolina PowerBuilder User Group -  Conference training sessions.  In this special PowerBuilder TV edition , SAP Mentor Yakov Werde will deliver a live instructor led unit from his Advanced PowerBuilder for Professionals Part 1 course.  The topic will be Stored Procedure DataWindow Objects in PowerBuilder 12.5 Classic and .NET: Basics and Tips & Tricks. As a bonus Yakov will take you on an Appeon for PowerBuilder migration ride and show you stored procedure DataWindows at work in both web and mobile environments

Manage the evolution of your PowerBuilder applications - Christophe Dufourmantelle

March 13, 2014 (Thursday) at 9:00 AM PDT (Los Angeles) 5:00 PM CET (Paris)

Learn how to share the knowledge of your PowerBuilder application among the team and to help maintain it as your team evolves. See how to manage unexpected side effects during modifications to your application. In this presentation, Christophe Dufourmantelle will demonstrate how Visual Expert lets you:

Explore and understand relationships within complex code

Automate an impact analysis to avoid the side effects of modifications

For those of you already familiar with Visual Expert, tune in to see how Visual Expert 7 improves the sharing experience, manages even larger sets of code and better automates your analyses. See how several developers can now simultaneously use the same VE project and share the results of an impact analysis.

Appeon for PowerBuilder: Resizing UI for Mobility - Yakov Werde

March 19, 2014 (Wednesday) at 9:00 AM PDT (Los Angeles) 5:00 PM CET (Paris)

The PowerBuilder platform is notoriously deficient at automatic or declarative UI resizing. In this presentation, SAP Mentor Yakov Werde will explain and demonstrate 3 techniques you can apply to your Appeon Mobile applications to achieve consistent UI resizing across a range of mobile device displays.

Just more of my HTML5 bashing....

HTML5 apps still not as good as native apps:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/mobile-development/forrester-html5-apps-still-not-good-native-apps-235189

Insufficient Storage Available errors on Android

Mostly just a note to self.  Apparently since the 4.2 update, you can get "Insufficient Storage Available" errors when updating apps on Android when there is plenty of free space available.  The solution is to enter "*#9900#" on the phone keypad and then select "Delete dumpstate/logcat".  For further info, see this thread:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16818049/insufficient-storage-available-even-there-is-lot-of-free-space-in-device-memor

FAQ: How can I send SMTP from PowerBuilder

PowerBuilder's only native method of sending email is through Simple MAPI, which is very limited.  In particular, the approach was hampered quite a bit when Microsoft introduced security enhancements which resulted in security warnings being generated anytime Simple MAPI was used.

The most popular approach for addressing this has been to use SMTP to send email instead.  There are quite a number of third party tools that can be used to accomplish this:

• Topwiz Software's EmailSMTP is a PowerBuilder non-visual user object that uses Windows API calls to send SMTP.

• PBNISMTP is an open source PowerBuilder extension (PBNI) written in C++ that wraps the open sourceCPJNSMTPConnection class to send SMTP.

• This blog post explains how to create a .Net assembly that can then be wrapped via a COM Callable Wrapper and called from Classic PowerBuilder.  The blog article uses Visual Studio and C# to create the assembly, but the assembly could also be created using PowerBuilder.Net.  The STMPClient.zip file in these PowerBuilder Samples on Google Drive is an example of doing just that.

• There are third party ActiveX controls that can be used to generate SMTP email, such as the Mail for Active X control from Dart.

• Many databases have build in features for sending email such as SQL Anywhere's xp_startsmtp / xp_sendmail, Oracle's UTL_SMTP or UTL_MAIL, Microsoft SQL Server's Database Mail, etc.  Therefore, it is quite feasible to create a stored procedure in the database that handles email transmission and simply have the PowerBuilder client invoke that.

So, where do we go from here (e.g. WebForms)?

As you're probably already well aware, the .Net WebForms target was removed from PowerBuilder beginning with the 12.5.2 maintenance release.  The reason it was removed was because of a third party control that was implemented in the later versions of it (11.5.x, 12.x, and 12.5.x) which SAP is no longer authorized to distribute.  As a result, they had to pull it from the product as well as remove any EBFs or maintenance releases that contained it.