The International Sybase User Group has announced additional dates for its North American PowerBuilder 11 Tour - 'Leveraging PowerBuilder in the .NET World' - following the success of the original thirteen city tour across the United States and Canada in October, November and December 2007.

01/12/2008 - Brad Wery announced his new website: www.PowerToTheBu ilder.com. The site offers a variety of GUI components to help you change the look of the software you create with PowerBuilder. Adding any of the following to your PowerBuilder application will give it an instant and much-needed facelift...

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Enable Runtime Explorer 2.5 beta features new automatic source change technology and the ability to write your own plug-ins. Enable Runtime Explorer (or simply Rex) is a runtime component that helps developers with their development, debugging and technical support work. The introduction of the new Automatic Source Change technology in Rex 2.5 eliminates the iterations between runtime and design time.

Sybase has announced that TransUnion, a provider of credit and information management, has chosen Sybase IQ to power its database of 280 million credit consumers. Sybase IQ, a highly optimized analytics server, was able to handle TransUnion's challenging data warehousing requirements with ease - it decreased query times, while significantly reducing hardware and energy requirements by achieving data compression of up to 82 percent.

In my first OrcaScript article 'Using OrcaScript to Automate Your Build Process With or Without Source Control' (PBDJ, Vol. 14, issue 6), I focused on automating the build process using OrcaScript. The entire article was based on the assumption that we might be using a separate build machine. Because of this, I avoided using or connecting to the workspace to get the source control connection parameters or to look at the source control status of each object. This time, I'll make things a little bit easier by using the workspace and focusing on writing short scripts and a reusable script that prompts for a target name.

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issue of .NET Developer's Journal, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers.

Recently I have been having déjà vu back to the days of PowerSoft. Back in the early 1990s when PowerSoft's product - called PowerBuilder - was in its heyday, it had been able to achieve dominance over arch-rival Gupta Technology and a myriad of other long forgotten competitors. Ironically, at the time, Gupta had a much more sophisticated object-oriented environment than PowerBuilder. But PowerBuilder was able to achieve leadership because the company found a way to make the traditional COBOL developer (and there were lots of them) very successful as graphical software designers.

With millions of iPhones sold in recent months, enterprises are challenged with how to manage the influx of these personal devices coming 'in the back door' without compromising security policies. One IDC analyst states, 'Bringing secure enterprise wireless email to the Apple iPhone brings it one step closer to being able to be used as a trusted enterprise device.' This session will advocate a proactive approach to adding iPhone as a supported device, and illustrate how doing so provides enterprise support for iPhones and reduces security concerns, while still providing a rich user experience utilizing the native iPhone mail application.

You're paying your application developers to write code. But are they doing what you're paying them to do? In most IT organizations, the answer is no. Industry analysts estimate that developers spend only about 20 percent of their time designing and coding. How do they spend the bulk of their time? Resolving application problems. Identifying and correcting defects discovered in the testing phase of a software project consumes 50 percent or more of your developers' time.

A new build of Coolmenu was released that includes the following modifications: Crash solved when using ChangeMenu; Bug solved when hiding and showing menuitems on the menubar; Colors more Office 2003-like. http://pbsite.milente.nl

The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) is a new top-level project at eclipse.org. Originally proposed by Sybase in February 2005, DTP has attracted strong community support and is currently managed by a committee comprised of Sybase, IBM and Actuate. It is an open source initiative designed to provide solutions in the data framework and tooling domains.

According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 24 months. Can software keep up? To do so, software vendors need to tackle the seismic shift in server technology toward 64-bit multi-core servers with massive memory banks. Software vendors have been slow to adopt the techniques required to get the most out of these new servers, never mind those coming in the future. And customers pay the price, without necessarily realizing it.

August is always an interesting month for me at Sybase. It's the month Sybase holds its User Training & Solutions Conference and employees like me get to meet a lot of customers and partners face-to-face. This year was no exception and I was thrilled to meet the folks, who I believe are the leaders responsible for the coolest weapons in the road warrior's arsenal. Who am I talking about? Why HTC of course, one of our great sponsors this year. In fact if TechWave were a Bond movie (forget Jason Bourne; I'm British and was raised on the one and only one JB), HTC would be Q, the guy with all the neat gadgets that look so normal from the outside, but pack an outstanding punch.

Or well, perhaps it just seems that way. Like the Dilbert strip where aliens kidnap the PHB and one of them impersonates him. They all notice because he's suddenly more competent and caring, so they don't report it. Sybase released PowerBuilder 11.0 in June of 2007 and hyped it at TechWave in August. 11.1 was (as I write this) recently announced and expected to be delivered in mid-November.

We make customized electronic medical record formats for physicians. We've been using multi-select list boxes to enter various choices together as part of a single column in many DataWindows in our applications. They help enter some interrelated data faster without creating an independent table and/or nested report.

Since I'm in the middle of moving to a new city and need to get organized, I thought I'd roll a little application using SQL Anywhere, PowerBuilder, and Amazon Web Services to help organize my media collection. In doing so, I'm going to check out some cool features in SQL Anywhere, in particular, consuming Web Services.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

I just wanted to acknowledge the tremendous increase in the amount of Blog activity that I have received over the past year. I think (and hope) that this is because many Sybase professionals out there have come to visit my site for latest information on the Sybase scene. Since I started my Blog in August of 2005 I have seen a steady increase in unique visits to my site. This whole Blog experience of course is Reed Shilt's fault. Reed is the development manager for PocketBuilder and started the whole thing off by opening his own Blog within PBDJ, then sending me an invitation to join him in this new venue. At that point in time, Blogging was a whole new experience for me and in fact, I had not even heard the term until I received Reed's email.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

In traditional application architectures, the design phase in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) plays a critical role in enabling well-architected solutions. Yet there hasn't been much discussion about the design or the modelling phase of SOA-based applications. Translating the business requirements into services and service models allows for leveraging services throughout the lifecycle. This also allows for mapping the services to an implementation architecture of right nature which could be based on component model like EJB or a simple database infrastructure. SOA is all about reuse and leveraging existing investments and a model-driven SOA allows for an intersection between requirements established as services and their implementation based on existing infrastructure and new components. This enables the business visibility into IT by making the changes visible in both directions, requirements and implementation. A demo will be using Sybase WorkSpace.

WaveMaker, formerly known as ActiveGrid, has announced a new corporate brand and product strategy that will address the growing demand for technology that simplifies the assembly of Web applications, while meeting the architectural, security and governance policies of CIOs. WaveMaker will bring to market software enabling the visual assembly and rapid deployment of scalable, enterprise Web 2.0 applications that are both Web Fast and CIO Safe.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Showing its strong commitment to the Sybase community, the International Sybase User Group has announced that it will be taking to the road with a series of PowerBuilder-focused events under the banner 'Leveraging PowerBuilder in the .NET World.' These hands-on technical seminars will introduce and educate attendees on methods to use PowerBuilder both as a .NET tool and alongside other .NET tools.

This article talks about the ease with which DataWindows can be designed and consumed in a Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 environment. The DataWindow .NET version 2.5 has the infrastructure to support this concept. With the earlier versions of the DataWindow .NET, such as 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0, the .NET developers had to depend on a standalone DataWindow Designer tool to design DataWindows before consuming it in the .NET Windows Form or ASP.NET applications.

August is always an interesting month for me at Sybase, as it's the month when Sybase holds their User Training & Solutions Conference and employees like myself get to meet a lot of customers and partners face to face. This year was no exception - I was thrilled to meet the folks who I have believed for a long while are the leaders and responsible for the coolest weapons in the road warrior's mobile arsenal. Who am I talking of? Why HTC, of course, one of our great sponsors this year.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

New technologies such as Google Gears are blurring the boundary between online web-based applications and offline desktop applications. 'Occasionally connected' applications that can work whether offline or online promise to solve many of the limitations of both desktop and web-based extremes. However, these applications introduce a new problem:synchronization. This talk highlights some of the hidden challenges of synchronization and explains how to solve them. It emphasizes the need to make synchronization central to your application, and addresses topics such as primary key generation, change tracking, the handling of deletes, scalability and performance.

SOA is all about reuse and leveraging existing investments, according to Ian Thain, senior technical evangelist / software engineer in the Worldwide Marketing Organization of Sybase, Inc. In Thain's view, 'model-driven SOA' allows for an intersection between requirements established as services and their implementation based on existing infrastructure and new components.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki

The inaugural iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (November 12-13, 2007) is building out its program and the Conference Advisory Board is busy sorting through the hundreds of proposals for technical and strategic sessions that have been coming in. Final deadline for proposals is September 10, 2007.

Novalys released Visual Guard for PB11. This tool secures PowerBuilder 11 applications and supports .NET Winform and ASP .NET Web forms deployment.

Software testing is an indispensable part of software development; it aims to assess the software quality and confirm whether the functions meet the requirements defined at the start of the project. In 1990 the IEEE/ANSI defined testing as: 'The process of operating a system or component under specified conditions, observing or recording the results, and making an evaluation of some aspect of the system or component.' (IEEE/ANSI, 1990 [Std 610.12-1990]). The 'specified conditions' could be comprehended as requirements or designs.

This article talks about the ease with which DataWindows can be designed and consumed in a Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 environment. The DataWindow .NET version 2.5 has the infrastructure to support this concept. With the earlier versions of the DataWindow .NET, such as 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0, the .NET developers had to depend on a standalone DataWindow Designer tool to design DataWindows before consuming it in the .NET Windows Form or ASP.NET applications.

PowerBuilder 11 introduces the WebForms target, which lets you transform an existing PowerBuilder application into a Web application with relative ease. While the deployed application will be remarkably faithful to the original client/server deployment in terms of application behavior, the degree of faithfulness is limited by the fact that your application is running as a Web application. The PowerBuilder component where this poses the greatest challenge is the DataWindow.

As Sybase's largest annual technical training conference, TechWave is the place to meet the experts, hear first-hand what's new, and network with thousands of industry professionals like you. It also contains a wealth of in-depth content that would be hard to find elsewhere, so when all that's added together, there's no better value for the money around.