The release of PowerBuilder 10 is exciting for many reasons. The 10-year anniversary of the product, back in 2001, was noteworthy and cause for celebration, but the tenth version of a product is even more momentous an occasion.

To survive through 10 versions of a product in an increasingly competitive market is a tribute to the strength and staying power of the product. You, our customers, have helped us reach this milestone by continually providing us with feedback and pushing us to make PowerBuilder a better product. Clearly, PowerBuilder still delivers on what made it wildly successful - productivity. Getting the job done, quickly and easily.

As technology continues to evolve and new standards, proclaimed magic bullets, languages, and new concepts emerge, PowerBuilder will continue to do what it does best - abstract the complexities of application development, let you build data-driven applications that run where you need them to run, and deliver them faster than anyone else. With PowerBuilder you can cut through the hype and focus on meeting your business needs. Isn't that what it's all about? We help you get the job done.

Let's look at the feature set of PowerBuilder 10 to better understand what we've added to increase your productivity. The product now supports Unicode because businesses operate in a global marketplace and international applications are a requirement. This enhancement ensures that you can input, retrieve, and display data from a variety of languages, including different languages having multiple byte character sets, all within the same window and within the same row in a DataWindow.

The PowerDesigner plug-in facilitates productivity whether you're refactoring an application for a new architecture, implementing a best practices object-oriented methodology, or just trying to figure out what code is where in the application that you've inherited. The XML Web DataWindow separates data and presentation on the client machine, giving you significant performance improvements in your Web-based applications. Caching display and layout information on the client machine means that the smaller amount of dynamically generated XML content will consume less bandwidth on subsequent trips back from the server. Web services are now easier to build and deploy - you never have to leave the PowerBuilder IDE because UDDI browsing is now a wizard-driven process within the product.

We're going mobile, too. Built-in support for MobiLink means your PowerBuilder applications are unwired. Give your users the freedom to use their wireless laptops wherever they want, ensuring they'll have the most up-to-date data with asynchronous data synch. And be the first on your block to write applications with support for the Tablet PC. With PowerBuilder it will be easy. A point release will deliver native support for these exciting new devices, so adding Tablet PC Ink support to your applications will be a breeze. With PowerBuilder 10, you can also add new user interface enhancements to your applications using the new calendar and animation controls.

What's coming next? We're planning the future today. PowerBuilder 11 and beyond will deliver more power and punch, but we'll continue to keep you highly productive. We're beefing up PowerScript to provide you with the robustness of a 3GL, while still maintaining the ease and productivity of a 4GL. This means you'll be able to use powerful programming constructs like interfaces and parameterized constructors and more graceful error processing and handling. This will also ensure better interoperability with .NET languages and Java.

Speaking of .NET, a .NET compiler is already in the works. You'll be able to generate MSIL and deploy an application as either a traditional Windows application or a Web Forms application - all with the click of a button. In the future, we'll also extend our integration with PowerDesigner to introduce business process modeling, data modeling, and design patterns into the PB IDE.

There's more, too. The user interface needs an upgrade. You know it. We know it. We're going to do it. We don't want to hear these words, ?You can spot a PowerBuilder application a mile away? any more than you do. And, at long last, there will be a PBVM for Linux - first for PowerBuilder 9.x and then for 10.x.

We're researching trends and soliciting feedback from customers on what you need, want, and where we should go. We are discussing the next-generation DataWindow - how to grab data beyond just the database and display it in various rich, graphical forms for the Web and the desktop. We're carefully considering which areas of the products should be our focus - finding our strengths based on your input, and determining where we should put more focus and energy.

We're excited about PowerBuilder 10 and about the future as well. We look forward to continuing to receive your input, ideas, and feedback, helping us build the future together. Let's get together at TechWave!