The Ottawa Sybase User Group’s last meeting was held on May 6, 2009. This was an all day event that spanned two sessions – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning session included a technical presentation on features of the newly released PowerBuilder 11.5.1 and a complete detailed in-depth tour of the new PowerBuilder 12 classic and PB 12.NET versions. The afternoon’s agenda was devoted to a “hands-on” training session with the new PB 12.NET IDE and its main features.

In attendance for the morning session were just over 60 attendees from various IT disciplines that included IT management, analysts, developers, project managers, independent consultants, architects, consulting firm technical representatives, etc. Some attendees even travelled to Ottawa from Montreal, Toronto and, even as far away as Buffalo and Winnipeg. The special guest presenter was Sybase engineering’s own evangelist Mr Dave Fish to talk about the technical details of the newly released PB 11.5.1 and the upcoming PB 12.NET release. The event was officially opened by OSUG’s president Chris Pollach who spoke about ISUG, local Sybase news, OSUG direction, and a special mini-report entitled “Chris`s Technology Watch”.

In the Technology Watch presentation, Chris highlighted the new source code management system from Roland Smith of TopWiz Software named WizSource. Chris gave an actual demonstration of this using PB 11.5.1 and PB 12 classic. The source code management system is all written in PowerBuilder and mimics the standard SCCAPI that Microsoft and PowerBuilder adhere to. The next technology to be show cased was from Brad Wery of Werysoft with his new QweryBuilder product. QweryBuilder is a great tool for developers, DBA’s and Analysts to investigate the structure and data behind any database schema. The QweryBuilder product itself is completely written in PowerBuilder and supports connectivity to ASE, SQLAnywhere, SQLServer and Oracle. The technology watch then moved on to the new VisualExpert 6.0 and VisualGuard 2.8 from Novalsys that supports PB 11.5.x along with a myriad of updated features. Up next was a tour of the new version of the STD Foundation Classes for PocketBuilder, PowerBuilder, InfoMaker and EAServer. The FC’s are now housed on the SourceForge.Net. Chris demonstrated a sample PowerBuilder application built from the framework running on an ASUS Windows Mobile PDA, WinForm, WebForm and Win32 version using the same PowerScript code. The next interesting technology that was reviewed was from Appeon Systems – the new Appeon 6.2 release that supports the webification of PowerBuilder applications written in PowerBuilder now up to and including PB 11.5.1. To wrap up the technology watch, Chris mentioned the adoption of Sybase IQ by CCRA (Revenue Canada) for all its Data Warehouse needs and the nomination of the PDMS (Patient Data Management System ) application for a Laureate Award for 2009 which was designed and built in PowerBuilder by the Ottawa Heart Institute. You can view Chris’ entire presentation by downloading the PowerPoint slides .

Dave Fish started his morning presentation focusing on the newly released PowerBuilder 11.5.1. Dave emphasized that this was not only just a maintenance release it also included some new features as well. He highlighted the key new features of PB 11.5.1 as: Support for Windows2000 deployment; .NET framework 3.5.1 compliance; JDK 1.6 support; MS-Office 2007 file format support; adherence to the FIPS 140-2 encryption standard; SQLAnywhere 11 database mirroring and support for the latest SQLServer and Informix database drivers.

Progressing into the PowerBuilder 12 Community Technology Preview section of the morning presentation, Dave indicated to the audience that Sybase will supply two versions of PowerBuilder to the customer base in version 12. These will be the “Classic” and .NET versions of the IDE. It is envisioned at this time that Enterprise customers who have an USP (upgrade subscription plan) will receive both versions of PB 12 for the one upgrade price. The classic version will be based on the newly released PB 11.5.1 code line and will extend the support for the current deployment targets. The new PB 12.NET version will be a total departure from the current Win32 PB genre. PB 12.NET will be totally based on developing applications for the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) facility supported by the latest .NET framework. WPF is Microsoft’s new presentation layer technology being cemented in place for the new Visual Studio 2010 release. Sybase has even been able to convert the DataWindow components to also use the WPF drawing feature. WPF utilizes the new XAML (eXtended Application Mark-up Language) to describe the screen layout, outputs / inputs and control requirements to the WPF .NET sub-system which then renders the screen using DirectX technology.

The other significant change (among many) for PB 12.NET is the departure from the PB 11.x IDE shell and adoption of the .NET Isolated shell that Visual Studio uses as its IDE. The change to the Microsoft IDE allows PB to: leverage more of the .NET framework; capitalize on assimilating 3rd party WPF controls; add “intellisense” and collapsing code blocks; position PB to take advantage of emerging technologies such as Silverlight; support for fully managed executable code generation and even support for 64bit MS-Windows just to highlight a few key areas. During the PB 12.NET talk, Dave was able to demonstrate the PB 12.NET IDE and run some example applications that emphasized these areas. The new software was “without a doubt” captivating to hear and watch for the all the OSUG members.

At the conclusion of the morning session, Chris and Dave were able to draw for various door prizes that included: Sybase “cool stuff”, free QweryBuilder software, free Appeon Software; and a complete 1 year ISUG membership (won by Henry Hanlin) as the grand prize. The session then concluded with a short Q&A session and some one-on-one discussions with Dave as OSUG prepared for the afternoon training session.

The afternoon session witnessed 34 attendees who were primarily PB developers. Most people brought their laptops and were able to load PB 12.NET and walk through the IDE and try some of the new features. This training tour was given by Dave Fish who also demonstrated various WPF features from his own machine. All the attendees were extremely impressed with PB 12.NET’s direction and for Sybase to take the initiative to show them this early version of PowerBuilder 12.NET along with a “test drive”. For the training session, Dave had prepared a full VMWare ready version of PB 12.NET that the attendees quickly loaded onto their machines. Being within a VMWare environment, there was no SDK, .NET, PB 12.NET, etc set-up required as the VM image was self contained and ready to rock!

The training started with a complete detailed tour of the new .NET Isolated Shell that included a few new features coming to the June CTP version that Dave had running in his latest PB 12.NET version hot “off the press” from Sybase engineering. This gave the attendees a great look at intellisense, collapsing code blocks, new object browser, etc while Dave was able to gather great feedback from the audience for engineering of what they would like in the final production product. The next section covered the XAML language and how PB 12.NET can incorporate 3rd party controls based on this technology. The next section covered the new WPF design painter that replaces the Window painter and some of the nuances when converting to this technology paradigm.

Dave then covered the considerations for migrating an existing older PB Win32 application over to the new PB 12.NET WPF architecture. He stated that it is Sybase’s intention to have this as automated as possible so that rewriting an older application will not be necessary. To backup his point, Dave demonstrated a migrated Win32 application now running as a WPF based one from within PB 12.NET – a true testimate to Sybase’s commitment in this area. Chris Pollach pointed out that Microsoft developers moving from Visual Basic version 6.x to VB.Net already have to rewrite their applications. VB developers will again have to rewrite or do significant enhancements their VB.Net applications to assimilate the WPF environment – whereas, PowerBuilder developers will enjoy the ease-of-migration in version 12 as they did in any other previous release.

Later versions of PB 12.NET beta versions will also include visual inheritance (coming soon to a newer CTP) that even VS2010 does not even support! VS developers today and with the new release next year must still control inheritance via code (my how archaic) instead of being able to handle this visually as all PB developers have come to enjoy in the product. Couple this with a WPF based DataWindow and one can see the enormous productivity gains possible with this PB 12.NET based technology direction. When asked about the debugging capabilities of PB 12.NET, Dave indicated that the product will use the VS debugger as integrated through the .NET framework which should be very extensive. However, Sybase will still try and make the interaction with the debugger more intuitive as in previous PB releases.

Overall, the attendees of the PB 12.NET training session were very impressed with Sybase’s PB direction and the fact that engineering has been proactive in informing the customer base about their efforts thus far. Dave iterated that for the production release (and even in the early beta’s) PB 12.NET will have WCF (Windows Communication Facilitity) capabilities, able to directly inherit from the .NET controls, etc. So by the GA release PB 12.NET will be a very robust truly .NET capable development tool.

Regards ... Chris

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