Microsoft recently released the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 in order to allow 'developers to incorporate VB.NET Forms and Controls into their VB6 applications' (www.mi crosoft.com/downloads/det ails.aspx? FamilyID=934d e3c5-dc85-4065-9327-96801 e57b81d&DisplayLang=en).

As with previous TechWaves, there are once again a number of changes. The most obvious one is that this year's event is at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino rather than Caesar's Palace. While not the complete move out of Vegas that I was hoping for, at least it's an improvement.

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East sponsors included: Laszlo Systems (Diamond Sponsor), JackBe (Platinum Sponsor), Adobe (Platinum Sponsor), Cynergy (Platinum Sponsor), Backbase (Gold Sponsor) Google (Gold Sponsor), Nexaweb (Gold Sponsor), ICEsoft (Gold Sponsor), Oracle (Gold Sponsor), Helmi Technologies (Gold Sponsor), JetBrains (Gold Sponsor), TIBCO (Gold Sponsor), Kapow Technologies (Gold Sponsor), Sun Microsystems (Silver Sponsor), Parasoft (Silver Sponsor), Servoy (Silver Sponsor), Etelos (Silver Sponsor), Microsoft (Expo Plus Sponsor), Lightstreamer (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), IT Mill (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), FrogLogic (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), ThinWire (Expo Sponsor), Quasar Tecnologies (Expo Sponsor), Zapatec (Exhibitor Plus Sponsor), MB Technologies Bindows (Exhibitor), OpenSpot (Exhibitor), ILOG (Exhibitor), Passport Corporation (Exhibitor), Addison-Wesley (Exhibitor), The Thomson Corporation (Exhibitor), Isomorphic Software-SmartClient (Exhibitor), Universal Mind (Exhibitor), Farata Systems (Exhibitor Plus), Manning Publications (AJAX Book Sponsor), Apress (AJAX Book Sponsor), Conference Guru (Media Sponsor), Flash Goddess (Media Sponsor), AJAXWorld Magazine (Media Sponsor), Web 2.0 Journal (Media Sponsor), SYS-CON.TV (Media Sponsor), IT Mill (Media Sponsor), Methods & Tools (Media Sponsor), Web 2.0 Journal (Media Sponsor), and OASIS (Association Sponsor).

I really like how all this was laid out. When we were at Caesar's the wi-fi lounge and tech support lab were basically hidden past the entrance to the exhibit hall. Here at Mandalay bay you walk into the South Pacific Ballroom and everything is immediately available. Email kiosks both to the right and left, wi-fi lounge to the right, registration to the left, tech support lounge to the far right and exhibit hall straight ahead. Welcome Session Real good food and lots of it, although they cleaned up a bit early. The DJ was a bit too loud for those of us trying to carry on conversations. Unlike previous TechWaves, no other particular action going on other than food, drinks and the DJ (no men on stilts, no gameshow). I didn't really miss them.

The best software development project can come to a dead end if you can't build an executable that your end users can run. Luckily, PowerBuilder provides several different ways to generate an executable with a variety of options. Most of these employ the use of the project painter and differ only by how we deploy the project (i.e., development IDE or command line). However, if you want to build your executable with relative pathing like Workspace has or passing-in parameters that change, then Orca-Script is the way to go. If you combine it with a command or batch file, you can automate your build and deploy steps into an unattended and/or scheduled process.

This article is based on my presentation at TechWave 2007 and is intended for the beginner or moderately experienced PowerBuilder developer. I hope to share some of the useful information I've picked up as an application developer using PowerBuilder and EAServer.

Sybase 365 has announced its mobile banking services are available to financial institutions in the Americas, extending its reach from Asia and Europe. In addition, the company commissioned a mobile banking survey across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, demonstrating the growing mobile banking trend.

Sybase Chairman, CEO, and President John Chen discussed his company's overall strategy, as well as key aspects of ASE 15.0 and Sybase's growing wireless business in an exclusive interview with SYS.CON.TV. He also went into the challenges and opportunities offered by China today.

'The Sybase IQ analytics server combines speed and agility with low total cost of ownership, enabling financial services companies to perform analytics that were previously unachievable or cost-prohibitive,' said Kathleen Schaub, vice president of the Information Products Group at Sybase.

As a software vendor developing a Windows-based PowerBuilder application often competing with Web-based applications, we decided that we need to embrace as many Windows advantages as we can. As you know, the latest hot-ticket item in that arena is Windows Vista. When we decided to pursue Vista certification for our product, we didn't fully understand what that really entailed. This article will give you some insight into how to structure a project to certify your PowerBuilder application for Vista - and it needs to be treated as a project, since it involves many different components.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

A seasoned Java professional has to know more than just the syntax of the Java language. Java EE offers a set of standardized technologies for enterprise development. A number of open-source frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate are widely used in a variety of Java applications. Familiarity with new 'beyond-Java' languages and technologies will widen your horizons and make you a more valuable Java professional. Real-World Java Seminar is sponsored by CodeGear, Red Hat, Nexaweb, Farata Systems, and PushToTest.

It will come as a surprise to no one that PowerBuilder's native graphing capabilities are somewhat lacking. Even the Define Graph Style dialog for the DataWindow graph style seems to have been left out of the GUI update in PowerBuilder 10.5 (see Figure 1). Forget Windows 95, this looks like something out of the version of Excel that came with Windows 3.1.

This article is about Oriam's real-life experience of porting its Clinical Trials Management System, EC1-TrialManager, to the Web. The product, initially designed as a PowerBuilder/Oracle client/server application, contained more than 300 screens.

What do you want to see in PowerBuilder 12? That's not just my question for you this month, it's also Sybase's question for you as well. Two things demonstrate that. The first is the recent invitation to participate in a survey by Sue Dunnell, PowerBuilder's product manager, so PowerBuilder users could 'provide some feedback to us as we plan for the next major release of PowerBuilder.'

The single-day, multi-track Real-World Java Seminar will be held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on August 13. Produced by SYS-CON Events, this is the largest Java developer event on the East Coast, and features a business track as well as two technical tracks. All attendees will have full access to all sessions at the event, so can either stay with one track or pick and choose specific sessions.

05/26/2007 - TopWizProgramming announced that PBSearch was updated to support PB11 and to add several new features. www.topwiz programming.com/pbsearch. html

In this article I'll cover how a model-driven design and development process can pave the way to a Service Oriented Architecture that will in turn produce accurate applications that meet business needs and increase development team productivity.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

Back in August of 2006, I wrote an article about calling .NET components from PowerBuilder using COM wrappers (i.e., CCW). Since I was basing it on a registry entry approach, the technique demonstrated required the component to be added to the GAC, which in turn required that we create a strong name and sign the assembly (besides having it compiled as a COM-visible assembly).

Codice Software has released Plastic SCM 1.5, the new version of its SCM product. This new release is a step ahead in the product's evolution and introduces many important new features and enhancements.

It may seem as if PowerBuilder programmers are bound to use global variables. Even the PFC, which is said to be the most successfully designed object-oriented framework, requires the use of global variables. Is it something in the nature of PowerBuilder that makes us use them? I won't discuss whether it's good or bad to use global variables as enough has been said on this subject. However, I am going to discuss why global variables are usually used in PowerBuilder applications and how we can live without them.

What do your applications do? They bring data flows in, send them out, store them somewhere or display them in various forms, and so on. There are many issues around data. Have you also found that a large part of your application's code manages or is driven by data? Aggregate, transform, classify, and compute... All of these actions suggest you adopt a more data-centric approach to software design and development.

Every few years somebody winds up the 'PowerBuilder is dead' argument, and every few years we beat it down again. This time it's Mary Brandel of ComputerWorld and her list of the 'top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills' (www.computerworl d.com/action/article.do?c ommand=printArticleBasic& articleId=9020942).

Sybase is the largest global enterprise software company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information from the data center to the point of action. Sybase provides open, cross-platform solutions that securely deliver information anytime, anywhere, enabling customers and partners to create an information edge.

'PowerBuilder has always been the fastest tool to develop with, and now that we can deploy applications to the .NET platform, we have more options for our customers,' said Ali Mehmet, technical director at Maracis Solutions Limited, a Sybase customer. 'Recently, we became a finalist for an important RFP with a working prototype built with the PowerBuilder 11 beta. We couldn't have done it without Sybase PowerBuilder.'

Sybase iAnywhere announced that Grant Thornton LLP, one of the largest accounting, tax and business advisory firms in the U.S., has selected Information Anywhere Afaria mobile device management technology to ensure that its policies, procedures, and other technical reference information are current and available to its 3,000 Assurance mobile professionals on their desktop and laptop computers.

Back in late 2002 I wrote an article on creating Web Services using PowerBuilder ('Implementing PowerBuilder-Based Web Services from PowerDynamo' http://pbdj. sys-con.com/read/42210.ht m). It was based on a PowerBuilder 8.0 component deployed to EAServer called from Web pages based on PowerDynamo that used DOM to generate HTML from the XML from the Web Service. Because PowerBuilder 8.0 didn't support the native generation of XML, PowerScript was used to generate it manually.

Most of the applications we software developers build need to interact somehow with data from a database. The .NET Framework defined by Microsoft provides a rich set of objects to manage database interaction; these classes are collectively referred to as ADO.NET and the latest versions of DataWindow .NET (which is now version 2.01).

Most of the applications we software developers build need to interact somehow with data from a database. The .NET Framework defined by Microsoft provides a rich set of objects to manage database interaction; these classes are collectively referred to as ADO.NET and the latest versions of DataWindow .NET (which is now version 2.01).

The current version runs with DataWindow.NET 2.0 and uses PowerBuilder 11 Web Services. To keep the installation slim it uses no database; instead the data is stored in DataWindows or XML files. Prognos makes use of AJAX techniques and accesses .NET classes from PowerBuilder for XML handling. Since it's used in Switzerland (which has four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh) it's multilingual.

Why upgrade to PowerBuilder 11? Here are some interesting and compelling reasons in my opinion... First, before we even get into the PowerBuilder details, PB 11 will be shipping with the new SQL Anywhere version 10 DBMS. This newest release is 'jam-packed' with over 200 new features and performance improvements so this DBMS engine will rival the big guys like Oracle, DB/2, SS2005 - but at a fraction of the price.

When your next application calls for a database backend, stop for a moment and consider another possibility: an object database. As we hope to show in this article, an object database may not only simplify coding chores, but its capabilities may enable application solutions that you would otherwise not thought of.

I just recently (finally) upgraded to a Wii, and I only had to pay about $50 over retail on an auction site to get it. Good luck trying to find one in the LA area; most stores told me it would be at least a month before they had more. Then try finding accessories once you have one. I had to hit a half a dozen stores before I found additional controllers. It's not because the stores don't carry them; it's because they fly off the shelves as soon as they come in.

The Real-World Java Seminar is a one-day event that's packed with technical presentations delivered by the Java industry experts. Attending this event will allow you to take a fresh look at the architecture of the projects you're working on now and can serve as a roadmap for your further development as a Java professional. The largest Java developer event on the East Coast, Real-World Java Seminar will offer sponsorship and exhibit opportunities to the leading Java technology companies. Additional information on sponsorship and exhibit opportunities can be obtained by e-mail at events(at) sys-con.com or by phone at 201 802-3021.

The Ottawa Sybase User Group was proud to be the first in North America to host the formal PowerBuilder 11 Launch Tour event! Joining us from Sybase USA for this special event were John Strano, Dave Fish, Jim O'Neil and Sue Dunnell (Launch Team). You can read all about them and the meeting agenda, by following this link (click here ). The OSUG meeting was attended by just over 60 people in the morning ranging from development managers, team leaders, developers, business analysts, etc. The turn-out was perfect as this was the comfortable limit for the Queens University lecture theatre.

Just over a year ago PowerBuilder 10.5 was about to release and we looked at the top 10.5 reasons to move to that version. In that same vein, I'm going to look at the top 11 reasons to consider PowerBuilder 11.0, which is just about to hit the street. This time I'm going to break those reasons into two groups: those that directly affect your end users (things they will notice) and thing that will make your life as a developer easier but won't necessarily affect your users. The reason I want to focus on them that way is because as developers we often get excited about the second set, but in order to sell an upgrade to our managers we often need to stress the former.

The United States part of the North American PowerBuilder 11 Launch Tour is starting in June. Here are the current city locations and a link (on the city name) to their respective registration information. The locations are as follows:

Are you interested in PowerBuilder in the UK? If so, do you know that we are launching PowerBuilder v11.0 this Thursday? PB11 Kick-Off - 24th May 2007, Emirates Stadium, London ...more details ...register

A major update (but not requiring a migration) will soon be looking for some beta testers. I was hoping to start the beta program right after Easter, but PB-11 and UL-10 kept sucking time away from PocketBuilder-centric activities.