Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

In September I'm heading to Germany to present to the German PowerBuilder user group. I'm also working on arrangements to go back over to Europe in November for other locations as well, including (hopefully), England and Switzerland. If you're interested in having me present at your user group as well, let me know.

Sybase video contest…Second Place!

As mentioned previously, Sybase held a video contest the results of which were decided at TechWave. I also indicated I was pretty sure I would at least get second place.

TechWave Conclusions

Once again I thought this was one of the best TechWaves in years. Better than last years, which was good. Having my laptop crash on me when I'm scheduled to do four sessions wasn't pleasant, and took the edge off of it for me. Otherwise, it might have been a real blast.

Techwave 2008 Presentations…

The URL was included in the daily TechWave guide.

Bloor Research blog on TechWave 2008

Part 1
Part 2

Friday - Trip home from TechWave

Only thought it was worth mentioning because of the weather. I'm driving back because I'm just going to LA. It takes a long to drive to Vegas from my house as it does to fly, and driving is (IMHO) more convenient.

It's 106 degrees outside as I'm flying down the I-15, and run into a rainstorm. Imagine significant rainfall and still 106 outside. There was actually a pretty significant cross-wind as well. The temperature did eventually drop to the mid-70s in the middle of the storm though.

Well, still significantly better than the hurricane that we just missed for the 2004 TechWave...

Friday - My 4th (and last) session

A repeat of my session from Wednesday on using .net assemblies from PowerBuilder. At this point, my laptop won't boot at all without crashing, even in Safe Mode. I have to borrow Terry Voth's computer and do my presentation based off the PDF version of the slides from the TechWave web site. I thought it still went fairly well considering, but I really would like to have done the demos.

Friday - ISUG Members Meeting

Interesting. They got a fairly small room and filled it with round tables so that everybody could eat their box lunch. The result is that more people showed up than we had spaces for. There was a short presentation and then a raffle than included a Wii. I hadn't heard there was going to be a raffle. Perhaps more would have shown up if the word had gotten out, but then you would have gotten folks that were just there for the raffle. I thought that this was a pretty good turnout considering. TechWave is already in shutdown mode. Depending on where you are flying out to a number of people had to leave already.

Friday - PB Web Services with Various Front Ends

Authur Hefti session on using PB web services from a number of front-ends, including Flex, Silverlight, Openlaszlo, VS.Net, PB.Net apps, Curl, etc.

Friday - Web Service Workshop

Sitting in on Dave Fish's presentation.

Thursday - Special Event

I actually didn't go, but I heard it was a blast.

Thursday - ISUG Enhancement Session

Changing it back to just before the special event seems to have worked. This was standing room only. There was the standard stuff about putting everything we mentioned into the enchancement system on the ISUG web site. The stuff that was raised during the session included:

Thursday - My third session

This one on doing online code review. Seems to have been well received, even though I couldn't do my live demo.

Thursday - PowerLunch

OK, this year I thought it was better, but probably just because I got their earlier and end up at a table where I was actually interested in the topic. I sat in at the Visual Studio Shell table. I had meant to sit in on the .Net Interop table, but that one had pretty much filled up, but the shell topic was a close second place topic for me.

Offline for a while

During my Wednesday afternoon session, my video monitor on my laptop started failing. I won't be posting quite as much until the end of TechWave.

Thursday - .Net Security for PB Applications

The presenter also did a PBDJ article on the same material. I played Mini-Me to Dave Fish. He was responsible for playing room monitor (scanning people when they came in, letting the presenter know how they were doing on time, etc.). But I took it over from him. Since I'd already reviewed the magazine article it was pretty much information I'd already seen, so playing room monitor kept me busy and out of trouble.

Thursday - My second session

The third edition of my "using Oracle" session. About the only updates this year were the support for High Availability events in PB11 and the new stuff in PB 11.5 which they had already covered at the keynote. My laptop would only boot into Safe Mode at this point, so I wasn't able to do any demos. Just as well, as just running through my slides took just about all the available time. I've either got to pare this thing down (which I'm loathe to do) or see if they will let me do it as a two-parter.

Wednesday - PB 11.5 Launch Party

Can't add much more than the Sybase folks did in their article on it. The photos of Jerry Siegal (middle left) and Millard Brown (bottom right) are classics. I wore my PowerSoft Conference 94 jacket and brought along my original TeamPowerSoft jacket (circa 1993), but it wasn't enough to win a prize. Don Clayton took first with his 92 conference shirt (which Alex Whitney had as well, but choose not to wear). Second place (if memory serves) went to somebody else wearing the 94 conference jacket, but who had also brought along a PowerSoft Code Partners bag. Third place (if memory serves) went to the person wearing a set of original PowerBuilder for the Mac CDs stabled to a Sybase baseball cap. I may have second and third place reversed.

The location was the House of Blues, which worked much better than the Rum Jungle (last year's location). Better lighting, easier access to food and more room. They extended the party an extra hour, and still had to kick a number of us out (including myself) at the end. They handed out some very nice jackets for the PB faithful.

Wednesday - My first session

On using .net assemblies from PowerBuilder. Some on the PB11 stuff. Mostly on using them via CCW with any version of PB. I've covered most of this in PBDJ articles. The main thing added for this session was supporting events when implementing visual components.

Wednesday - Lunch

In the Exhibit Hall. Once again, I believe it worked well.

Wednesday - Keynote

Not quite a keynote. Instead, there was:

Sybase Innovator Awards
A panel of the Sybase engineering VPs
A customer panel headed by a Forrester analyst
A talk by a futurist

Tuesday - TeamSybase reception

And, just in case we didn't get enough to eat, TeamSybase had their own private reception after the Sponsor Reception.

Tuesday - Sponsor Reception

After the education sessions ended, we all headed over to the Exhibit Hall for the Sponsor Reception. This is the first time the Exhibit Hall is open. There were a number of sealed off booths available with chairs and tables, apparently for people who wanted to have conversation with less distractions. The Ask-The-Experts section seemed pretty busy as well.

Tuesday - Education Session

Mine was EDU206 - Performance and Tuning for PowerBuilder: Advanced Tips and Techniques - Hands On

Tuesday - ISV Luncheon

At lunchtime met with Sue Dunnell, John Strano and others for an ISV luncheon.

Tuesday - Plenary Session

There were 5 (count them 5!) simultaneous plenary sessions this year. I went to the PowerBuilder one of course. There was some discussion and demonstration of features in PowerBuilder 11.5, the release date for which was just announced today. There was also quite a bit of discussion and demonstration of upcoming features of PowerBuilder 12.0, even though it is still very early in it's development cycle. The ISUG Technical Journal Award was handed out during between the discussion of 11.5 and 12.0.

Tuesday - Keynote

John Chen spoke first and gave some discussion of the overall position of Sybase. One item of particular interest (at least to me) is that TechWave is moving back to the east coast next year. Yeah! Raj Nathan spoke next and discussed the Sybase Unwired Platorm. Finally, Geoffory Moore spoke and then led an industry panel consisting of SAP, IBM and MicroStrategy. Geoffory Moore is, among other things, the author of "Crossing the Chasm". You may remember that I quoted from his extensively in my "Innovate or Die" postings a couple of years ago.

PowerBuilder 11.5 release announced

Sybase announced the planned availability date of PowerBuilder 11.5. The latest release of PowerBuilder continues Sybase's commitment to simplify complex data access, manipulation and presentation through its patented DataWindow technology, especially for developers looking to deploy PowerBuilder applications to the .NET framework.

PowerBuilder wins Visual Studio Magazine Award Readers Choice Merit Award

Sybase announced that it has been recognized by Visual Studio Magazine with a Readers Choice Merit Award in the category of Software Design, Frameworks and Modeling Tools. The annual awards honor the best Visual Studio-focused tools in 22 categories, and the winners are selected by readers of Visual Studio Magazine. Winners are recognized in three overarching categories, including Readers Choice, Readers Choice Merit and Editors Choice. The Readers Choice Merit category, in which PowerBuilder was recognized, is reserved for products that received a high number of votes, and also demonstrated clear value to Visual Studio Magazine readers. The editors of the magazine note that the Readers Choice awards are particularly significant because they reflect the preferences of the actual users who have daily experience with a broad range of Visual Studio developer tools. The winning products were chosen because they help professional developers do their jobs more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Monday - Techwave Reception

This year the reception buffet featured food from "around the world". Nothing that quite fit on my diet, but to each their own. No live entertainment this year, but pool tables and pinball games were made available. A good time was had by all, but they could have used more chairs. I'd also prefer different (more healthy) food.

Monday - Techwave Registration

Pretty much same as prior years. The registration area is located to the left of the entrance to the exhibit hall and the email kiosk/wifi area/ask-the-expert section to the right of the entrance. Once again they give you a card when you register that you use when you go to a different section of the registration area to pick up your course material.