Thursday, February 23, 2006

TechWave 2006 Call for Papers is Open

Sybase is looking for presentations for their next annual Sybase TechWave User Training and Solutions Conference, in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 6-10, 2006. If you have solved a unique business challenge utilizing Sybase products, they would like you tell the thousands of TechWave 2006 attendees about it. You can visit www.sybase.com/techwave to apply. If you are selected as a conference speaker, you will receive a complimentary conference pass valued at $1,795. Applications must be submitted no later than April 3, 2006. Sybase will notify you in April if you have been selected for a technical session. More information on track descriptions and the online application form can be found at www.sybase.com/techwave. Specific questions can be directed to sybase.techwave@sybase.com.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

PowerDesigner WebCast

PowerDesigner: Aligning Business and IT
March 28 and May 9, 9am PT/12pm ET

A live webcast to help new or potential customers see how PowerDesigner can help them build or re-engineer applications quickly, cost-effectively and consistently.

World Wide PowerBuilder Survey

Novalys is doing their annual world wide PowerBuilder survey for 2006.

When you complete the survey you can see the results of last years survey.

PowerBuilder 10.5 Launch Seminar

PowerBuilder 10.5 Launch Seminar
Lord’s Cricket Ground
London, England
March 8, 2006

AGENDA

09.30 Registration and refreshments

10.00 PB10.5 Features Overview and Walkthrough
Discover the new UI, toolbars from the new release of PowerBuilder.
- Treeview, a new DataWindow presentation style
- New DataWindow functionality, including autosize height on all bands
- User interface improvements with new icons, menus, toolbars, rich text control and datetime picker control
- New BYTE datatype
- Updated RDBMS support for Oracle and ASE 15
- Enhanced Web Services support for PowerBuilder clients. 10.5 has a Web Services implementation that supports .NET

11.00 Coffee break

11.15 PB for all your development
We uncover lesser known features of PowerBuilder that make your development easier. PowerBuilder Does That? - If you think PowerBuilder is all client/server, think again. PowerBuilder does distributed computing and lets you work in a J2EE environment.

- PB for Application Servers using the new PBVM plugin, enabling you to deploy PB applications with your choice of app server
- PB for Java. The JSF Datawindow will enable your Java developers to use PowerBuilder DataWindows
- PB for .NET. PowerBuilder and DataWindow .NET give you 4GL solutions to .NET development
- PB for Mobility. PocketBuilder enables you to build and deploy a mobile application in less an hour
- PB and the WEB. The WebDataWindow, did you know there is WEB authoring with PB, or Web DataWindow availability to JSP ?

12.45 Lunch

14.00 Discover the world of Lords Cricket Ground – Tour and visit to see the Ashes

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Visual Expert

Perhaps you've already heard of Visual Expert. If not, it's well worth looking at. Basically it's a code analysis and reporting tool for PowerBuilder applications. There are a large number of features in the product, too many to cover in a single blog posting. Today I just want to focus on three that I use extensively.

Dead Code
The tool examines the code and locates functions, attributes, variables, function parameters and event parameters scripts to determine when there are variable declarations that are no longer used. It's very useful if the application is a bit older or has gone through major rework and you're no longer sure what's actually being used.
Dead Code

Unused Components
The Unused Components analysis does for objects in an application what the Dead Code analysis does for code in objects. You have to be a lot more careful with this one though. If the objects are referenced dynamically, the tool has no way of determining the reference. For example, many of the objects reported in this analysis are referenced as a result of data coming from the database (the database contains the object references). Still, it gives you a good start on determining where you should start looking for dead objects.
Unused Components

Development Rules
If your development shop is rigorous about following coding guidelines (mine is), the Development Rules analysis comes in real handy. If I'm working on some major modifications or some large new functionality, I find it all too easy to skip over doing stuff like adding script headers until the code is complete. The problem is, once the code is complete I'm not really sure where I have addressed the guidelines and where I haven't. The Development Rules analysis tells me exactly where I need to revisit.
Development Rules