ISUG Mobility SIG Conference Call

This month's ISUG (International Sybase User Group) mobility SIG (Special Interest Group) conference call on April 19th at 12:00 Central will look at Smart Client Development for Windows Mobile and CE. Ian Thain will be the guest presenter demonstrating Sybase's award winning RAD 4GL Smart Client Development tool (PocketBuilder) and his well known "Insurance Assessor Application" .

Innovate or Die - Intro

I'm going to be starting a series of posts on the topic of "if you could tell Sybase how to do things differently, what 10 things would you tell them to do". I'll have a different post for each of the 10 different things (or as many as I get to, I'm not sure I'll actually have 10 when I'm done).

To back up those suggestions, I'll be turning to a number of recognized experts in the business field. I'll be using information from their blogs and/or recent books to support my suggestions for a change in method of operations. Those experts are:

• 
  Geoffrey Moore is a co-founder and managing director at TCG Advisors and founder of The Chasm Group. He is the author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game (with co-authors Tom Kippola and Paul Johnson), Living on the Fault Line, and most recently Dealing with Darwin.


• 
  Kathy Sierra is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series (finalist for a Jolt Software Development award in 2003, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Books for 2003 and 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com.


• 
  Eric Von Hippe is a Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is the author of The Sources of Innovation and more recently Democratizing Innovation.

Ottawa Sybase User Group Meeting

The Ottawa Sybase User Group (OSUG) will be holding their next meeting on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006. OSUG's mission is to create a Sybase community in the National Capital area where users can share knowledge, experiences and best practices. Users of all Sybase products, including data management, tools and mobility, are welcome to attend.

This meeting will feature networking opportunities, product updates and a discussion. Mr Dave Fish, Sybase's Senior technical Evangelist for PowerBuilder, InfoMaker, and PocketBuilder will be our primary guest speaker. Dave will be demonstrating the new .NET Web Services, upgraded GUI Interface, WinForm, WebForm and Smart Client .NET 2.0 support in PB 10.5 and 11. He will also be showing the new PocketBuilder 2.04, DataWindow.Net 2.0 for VisualStudio2005 and PB 2006/2007 roadmap.

The North American Regional User Group Director (Joe Burger) from the International Sybase User Group (ISUG) will also be joining us on May 2nd and will be making a special 15 minute presentation. Afterwards, come and ask Joe about ISUG and how you can get copies of: copy of: DataWindow.NET 2.0, PocketBuilder 2.0.4, PowerBuilder 10.5 , SQL Anywhere Studio 9; IQ 12 ;Pylon 5; EAServer 5.3; and ASE 15 .... all for $75!!!!!

For detailed information, see Chris Pollach's blog.

PowerBuilder 11 Customer Technology Preview (CTP)

Sybase just announced a public Customer Technology Preview for PowerBuilder 11. The CTP program is designed to involve customers and partners, before a formal beta period, to facilitate timely and relevant feedback into the product development cycle. They are providing this early build to their extensive technical community of developers to enable the largest number of users possible to test the .NET WebForm deployment feature.

Your participation in the CTP program will give you the opportunity to test-drive this new functionality for yourself and see your existing applications run in a browser. Deliver proofs of concept for your projects, and help them ensure they are including the key features and functionality customers require.

Sign up here!

DataWindow.Net 2.0

Sybase released version 2.0 of DataWindow.Net. The new version:

• supports the .NET Framework 2.0


• accepts DataSets and DataTables as data sources


• introduces new properties and functionality, including autosize height on all parts of a DataWindow


• introduces a new presentation style, the TreeView, for easily presenting hierarchical data


• updates support for database connectivity, including Oracle and ADO.NET


• updates icons


• add a new DatePicker edit mask for putting calendar functionality into a data field


• enhanced DropDownDataWindows used in Web applications