Sometimes 64 bit can truly be a pain...

Two things have bitten me in the butt recently.

#Techwave 2010: Wrap Up

With a couple of days to mull it over, here's my take on the conference.

SAP/Sybase joint strategy and product innovations webcast

On August 19, 2010, SAP and Sybase business leaders will unveil their joint strategy and product innovations for customers in enterprise mobility, business analytics, and enterprise information management at a press briefing in Boston, MA, and Frankfurt, Germany from 10:00 - 11:15 a.m. EDT.

http://www.sap.com/about/newsroom/index.epx

#TechWave 2010: Video

I had problems getting the video uploaded to the fotki site where I have my pictures posted, so I uploaded them to vimeo instead.  The password for the album is the same as the password for the wifi at the event.  Obviously, I won't be giving up my day job for a new career in videotaping conferences.

Vimeo has a limit on the amount of video I can load per week.  I got most of it uploaded this week, and I'll get the rest loaded next week.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 4: Final random thoughts

My friend Rueben from Peru came by at 6:00 am this morning to drop off something on the way to the airport, so I finally got to hear (and see) the results of someone using the doorbell on the hotel room door. In addition to the sound, there is a flashing light that I at first thought might be a fire alarm.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 4

Techwave still goes on for some of us today. TeamSybase members are having roundtables with Sybase product management folks all day today.

It's been sunny, warm and humid all week that I've been here. This morning some thunderstorms rolled through. Quite a change.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: TeamSybase Dinner

TechWave is officially over, but I'll still be here for a couple more days. One reason is because we have a TeamSybase dinner after the conference. One of the things we'll be doing is officially inducting several new members: several SQL Advantage people (who currently do support in a separate forum), Yakov Werde (who in addition to posting in the newsgroups also writes articles for PBDJ and the ISUG journal on a monthly basis, and Jonathan Baker, the guy who has been managing the group for the last couple years and is now moving on to other responsibilities within Sybase.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: Enhancement request session

This session was done a lot different than any previous enhancement session I've ever seen at TechWave. In prior years these tended to be run by ISUG, started out with a discussion of the ISUG enhancement request web site, and the a bunch of rather minor enhancement requests would be thrown out by the audience, to which ISUG would ask that the requested put it through the web site. The session really seemed redundant to the web site, and no serious discussion of the more higher level direction of the product was ever raised. Generally a number of people would complain about Sybase's lack of marketing.

This year the session was lead by Sue Dunnell, the PowerBuilder project manager for Syabse along with Dave Fish and John Strano. A lot of discussion revolved about Silverlight and otter possible options for deploying to non desktop clients (web, iPhone, android). Dave Fish mentioned that they were considering looking into an objective-C emitter to provide iPhone support.

Perhaps they should rename the session to "product futures". I really liked this higher level focus on the product direction rather than small minor improvements.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: PowerBuilder Roadmap

The roadmap that Sue Dunnell displayed was basically the same ose they showed during the Developer Days tour. It was updated a bit, it showed a 12.1 maintenance release in September of 2010 that would provide:

3rd party plugin support
ASE 15.5 and SA 12.0 support
Win7 64 bit OS support
XAML editor enhancements
IDE enhancements
WPF DW Right to Left
OLE support in WPF

The reference to 64 bit Window 7 just means it will be a supported platform for development and deployment. The IDE will still be 32 bit, as will the generated applications.

The OLE support in WPF is migration only, you won't be able to add additional OLE references in the migrated application.

It also shows 12.5 release for July 2011 with the following:

Enhanced WCF
.Net 4.0
Based on VS 2010
PowerBuilder in the Cloud
REST based web services
Usability enhancements
Refactoring support (infrastructure)
Custom visual objects as assemblies
InfoMaker for WPF
Win32 DataWindow Enhancements

Finally, under a big notice that says "FEATURES UNDER CONSIDERATION - SUBJECT TO CHANGE" it talks about a 15 release 12-18 months after the 12.5 release with the following:

SilverLight
.Net Framework update
HTML5
Mobile targets
Refactoring support
New DataWindow Data Sources

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: Fun with the PB Debugger

John Strano's session on the debugger in PB.Net.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: Is there anybody out there? Communication via WCF and PB

Dave Fish's session on using the WCFClient.

Learned something: the order of the namespaces in the usings determines what order PB looks for assemblies in them, which is why there are up/down buttons for the list.

Note: references to third party controls, including controls in the .net framework, need to be in lower case.

When WCF Services are made available in 12.5, you will be able to deploy them as console as as well as iis, so you won't be required to have iis installed to develop them.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: How to Rock .NET Part 3: Digging into the .NET Framework to enhance your PowerBuilder WPF applications

Dave Fish demonstrating some of the .Net classes that are available for use from PB.Net applications (SMTP, text-to-speech).

#Techwave 2010 – Day 3: Stand by, we are having technical difficulties (resolved)

The good news is that the prior posts were older revisions on the posts that overwrote them.  I believe I've got everything back in place.  If you're following along on the twitter feed, I suggest visiting my blog at some point to see if there are some entries you're missing.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: How to Rock .NET Part 2: Leveraging PB .NET classes in VisualStudio

Evan Rothfield's demonstration of using a PowerBuilder generated .Net assembly in a Visual Studio project.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: Stand by, we are having technical difficulties...

I just realized the WordPress iPad app I've been using to post my blog entries has been overwriting some of my previous entries.  Going to take a while to reconstruct some of the entries.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: How to Rock .NET Part 1: Inheriting from C# classes in a PowerBuilder .NET application.

Dave Fish giving the first of the hands on sessions, in this case inheriting a PB class from a .Net class. He demonstrated not just the use of the inherited object, but debugging it as well, including dropping into the C# code of the .Net assembly (provided you are working with a debug build of that assembly).

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: Yet More Random Thoughts

A couple of swag items: Sue Dunnell was handing out "backstage passes" which you took back to the registration area to receive a PB hoodie. Also, the first JAGTAG award was a coupon texted back to you which you took back to the registration area to receive a set of magnets (don't get them too close to your hard drive).

Just a note about a previous entry: I did complain to the hotel about the rolling chair and they did replace it within a few minutes.

One thing that impresses me this year is the social media impact. It's rather interesting to watch Twitter or Facebook and see that a number of the people you are following are also here and are posting, sometimes from the same session (sometimes from people sitting next to you). I know that they were promoting social media in prior Techwaves, but this year it really seems to have taken off. The only downside is that I can get so focused on doing my own posting or reading others that I miss out on portions of the session that I'm actually in.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: I’m a WPF Developer: taking a Win32 application to .NET

This presentation and another unscheduled one on a PFC extension for 3 tier apps were conducted at the same time that they handed out the flash drives with the virtual machines for the later hands on sessions. Getting the virtual machine installed took so long that I'm afraid that those two sessions didn't get a whole lot of focus.

They did finally get this particular conference room hooked up with outlet strips though a bit late. Apparently the hotel staff hooked up a different conference room by mistake, and had to change it at the last minute.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 3: Continental Breakfast

Different day, same stuff. The big difference is that there were a lot fewer people here. I take that to mean that a lot of people had a lot of fun until very late at the special event last night.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Special Event

The special event was at the museum of crime and punishment, which happens to also be the studio for america's most wanted. It's a bit of a hole in the wall, not in any negative sense, you just wouldn't know it was there unless you were looking for it.

As we first started walking through the halls were a bit narrow and you end up wondering if they have enough space and food for everyone. It opens up quite a bit later on and you realize they have plenty of food and space. There was a live band on the lowest floor where the AMW studio was at, as well as a rock star video game. Sue Dunnell and company were handing out the PB 12 temporary tattoos (the flaming guitar). Apparently Dave, John and Millard got involved in some air guitar at some point, as they re-enacted it for us at the first session the next day.

It was a little to macabre for me to eat standing in the morgue, but otherwise great.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Getting down with .NET – In-depth review of .NET language enhancements

Yakov's discussion of the impact of PowerBuilder's CLS compliance. Classic PB is a consumer of CLS, PB.Net is an extender of CLS. Demonstrated the bit shift operators, generics and interfaces in both the PB Classic and PB.Net IDEs.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: PB: The Real World. How I went from win32 to .NET with PB

Yakov's in-depth look at how he implemented the Stock Trader reference application in PowerBuilder.Net. There was some discussion of architecture, and a lot on some of the issues with using wcf sourced data windows.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: REAL Intellisense and Autoscripting in PowerBuilder .NET

Yakov's showed up a bit late for his session after lunch, so they proceeded with a session that was originally scheduled for later in the day. Evan Rothfield discussed not only intellisense, but also many of the user customizable options in the script editor for controlling the way is behaves. One item that was particularly popular was the addition of support for intellisense for datawindow object controls (e.g., columns).

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: More random observations

I discovered that the tech support sessions is only staffed by ASE people (and the signs for it do indicate something to that effect). I've talked to other conference attendees though and you can go in with questions on other products. They just hook you up via an IP videophone with a tech support person in their offices.

The wifi here sucks. Too many nerds on it at the same time it seems.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Lunch

Lunch was largely the same as yesterday. Fine by me as chicken is on my diet, but other attendees were a bit surprised. Had to eat on the run, as I ran to rite aid at the beginning of lunch and picked up a 25 ft extension cord and a multi-outlet strip. At least I and the folks near me will have power.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Start the party! Third party controls in PowerBuilder .NET

Dave Fish's presentation on using 3rd party .Net controls. Indicates there is a problem with custom commands, but otherwise just about every control they tried worked fine in PB.Net so long as it actually works in VS.Net.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: How I Migrated to PB 12.NET (Customer presentation)

A customer demo. A government agency tried to replace an old PowerBuilder app with Java. 160 developers worked on the project and spent billions(?) on it, and failed. One of the original developers of the PowerBuilder app was called back in and modernized the app with PowerBuilder.Net in a short time. Used devcomponents 3rd party wpf control to modernize the app (docking panes, ribbon control).

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Morning Break

Kudos for the break, at least from me. Powerbars and fruit. Going to need that long term energy, because it's a long way to lunch.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Get your XAML on! Using PowerBuilder and Expression Blend Together

John Strano's second session, showing how you can import the PB.Net assemblies into Expression Blend so you can use that to do sophisticated XAML generation for your PB.Net applications.

Of particular interest was the ability to assign a name to a non-visual XAML class (in this case a storyboard) and then have it appear in the script editor so that you can code it's events.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Getting your XAML on! Using PowerBuilder’s XAML Editor

John Strano's primer on XAML and how it's implemented in PowerBuilder.Net.

Visual Inheritance: not supported by XAML, implemented in PB.Net. However, they recommend (for now) you add controls through the Layout editor rather than the XAML editor. Also, if you add a control to an ancestor it gets picked up by descendants, but it appears that if you remove a control from an ancestor you need to manually delete it from the descendants.

#Techwave 2010: Day 2: Random Observations

More complaints about the hotel. They gave me a rolling desk chair with a broken roller. It's worse than not being able to roll at all. And the Internet speed from the hard wired connection isn't much to write home about. In fact, it doesn't seem to be any faster than the wireless connection (in fact the speed test I ran showed that the wireless connection was faster!). Hardly seems adequate for a technical conference.

More an observation than a complaint, I seem to be a room equipped for the hearing impaired. There is a light on the wall to indicate when the phone is ringing. I'm also the only room on the floor (that I've noticed) that has a doorbell. Not sure what it does yet, I haven't tried it yet.

Note to Sybase: Please, please, please make power outlet available for the attendees in the meeting rooms. You give them a USB stick with the presentations on it so people can follow along on their laptops. You schedule sessions all day long. You realize that most people have laptops that will only run 1.5 to 3.0 hours without recharging?

#Techwave 2010 - Day 2: Continental Breakfast

I suppose a continental breakfast isn't a continent, and it isn't really a breakfast. I don't expect conference meals to meet my dietary needs given my somewhat health conscious diet (best rabbit and bird food money can buy), but I was hearing a number of complaints from regular conference attendees about the breakfast. That was on Monday, and Tuesday's seemed a step down from there.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 1: Reception

Another day at techwave, another reception. This one was hosted by HP. If there was any doubt in my mind that there were 750+ people at this event (and I had my doubts), this reception ended those. It was quite well attended.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 1: Holy .NET Implementation! Review the NET Stock Trader application – in PowerBuilder!

The first half of of Yakov's session on implementing the Stock Trader reference app in PowerBuilder 12, both in classic and .Net. Today was the overview, tomorrow he goes into details about the implementation.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 1: Tools Plenary

Dave and John did pretty much the same presentation as they did for the roadshow, with the exception of an additional app, a demo app one of their clients created for the world cup.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 1: Mobility Plenary

Three plenaries are going on simultaneously, so you have to pick one of the three to attend. There are two sets as well. Sat in on the mobility plenary among the first set. The plenaries are right next to the room we had lunch in (and were the keynotes were), so if was quite convenient.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 1: Lunch

Kudos to the people managing the conference. Immediately after the keynotes ended, the people serving food moved in. We were all served quickly and there was enough food for everyone (unlike LA, which is the only reason I mention it).

#Techwave 2010 – Day 1: Opening Keynote

The keynote area was interesting, it was set up with tables like a lunch area. Much more comfortable. The keynote was actually an interview of John Chen by an analyst, which helped keep it more interesting than a long spiel from a set of PowerPoint slides.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 1: Registration

Registration was a bit tricky to find.  The concourse is the lowest floor of the building (several floors below the lobby) and there weren't really any signs pointing the direction to it.  You actually had to walk through the continental breakfast areas and the table top exhibit area to get to it.  Registration itself was a breeze.  Even though there were only four checkin areas and only one was for full conference attendees, you just walked up and gave your name.

#Techwave 2010 - Day 0

Today was just travel to the event and the welcome reception. The only problem with getting to the airport is that apparently the highway department thought that crack of dawn Sunday morning was a good time to shut the 105 down to one lane. Ended up taking surface streets the last few miles.

PowerFilter....

I blogged on this a while back when it first showed up in a youtube video (Excel like AutoFilter for the DataWindow).  Turns out Brad Wery liked it so much that he's now offering it through his PowerToTheBuilder site under the name PowerFilter.  Definately worth a look.

PowerBuilder TV: Building your first mobile application using PocketBuilder

Tuesday August 17th at 5:00pm EST (New York) / 23:00 CET (Paris)
Presenter: Chris Pollach

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/402406314