Frederick Koh

By the time you are reading this, PB12.5 will have been released and work on PB15 well under way. A lot of exciting things have gone into the .NET version of PB but we still get requests for features to go into the Classic version of the product. Even though there was a lull in activity in PB12 Classic, we are back again in 12.5 - and we are not stopping. You will probably have seen Dave Fish's webcasts on plans for PB15 (his disclaimers apply here as well) and are hungry for details - I hope to address that in this article. PB has been around a long time and has accumulated many quirks and inconsistencies. We also have feature requests that are almost as old as the product itself. Our recent releases have done a lot to address these issues, but there are still many features that either need to be updated or simply completed. It would be amazing if you can still get ... (more)

New Features for the Win32 Target in PB12.5

With all the attention in PB12 focused on .NET and WPF, some of you may be wondering about the future of Win32 targets in what is now being called PB Classic. Those hoping to still continue to work with Win32 targets in PB Classic can rest assured, PB Classic is not going away and we are backing that statement up with the features we are going to introduce in PB12.5. Controls in DataWindow and Outside Converging in Capabilities In this major release you are going to find two long-asked-for features finally implemented: Autowidth for the Grid DataWindow Tab order, enabled, and focus... (more)

PowerBuilder Cover Story — The DataWindow in PowerBuilder 11 Web Form Targets

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. The aim of this article is to point out where the transformed application will differ in terms of latency, ... (more)

Writing COM Controls for PowerBuilder in C#

While there is literature describing how to use .NET controls in PB (see for example, past issues of this magazine), all are silent on how to set control properties at runtime and how to persist them. This article will address both issues. Like regular OLE controls, you can allow your .NET control properties to be set at design-time by means of property pages (see Figure 1). Sample Code in PB12 Resource Page The ideas in this article have been implemented in source code available at the PB12 Resource (http://www.sybase.com/powerbuilder12). Look for "Writing A COM Control for PB ... (more)

New DataWindow Features in PowerBuilder 11.5

In PowerBuilder 11.5 we introduce features that allow you to easily give your existing DataWindows a new look and feel. New properties are added to columns and controls to allow you to add tooltips. You no longer have to settle for single-colored backgrounds. We have introduced properties to control color gradients and translucency for the background of columns, and most controls and bands. For the DataWindow background, in addition to color gradients, you can use bitmaps as wallpaper, giving you control over how the image is tiled. Since these new properties are DataWindow prope... (more)