ISUG Tech Conference 2014 Report

Monday

Location

It's good not to be in Las Vegas.  The location in Atlanta is rather convenient.  You can take a MARTA train straight from the airport to a shopping mall close to the hotel and then take a covered walkway from the mall to the hotel.  The one issue though is that things are not well marked.  It seems that the people responsible for signage may be looking at it from the perspective of people that already know the area. I found it quite hard to find my way around when I first arrived.

How to use .Net visual controls in PowerBuilder Classic

Using non-visual .Net classes in PowerBuilder Classic is somewhat straightforward.  Provided the assembly (and the classes and methods within it) have been marked as COM Visible, you can run REGASM on them to create OLE registry entries and then use the class through OLE Automation.  I have a video on the SAP D&T Academy that demonstrates the process.

If you think folks that have PowerBuilder apps have trouble finding developers...

Imagine what it's like for people still running VB6 apps.  A couple of things actually make it worse for them:

1.  VB6 is no longer available for retail purchase.  The only way to get access to it now is with a MSDN subscription.  That doesn't exactly make it attractive to new developers.

2.  VB6 was never updated for compliance with operating systems later than XP.  As XP is being desupported, it becomes increasingly difficult to support VB6 apps on more recent operating systems.

For more info, see:  VB6: The Looming Crisis

I also found this interesting.  There was a time even when PowerBuilder was at it's peak when the number of VB6 job offerings dwarfed the PowerBuilder offerings.  Here's some more recent data.

PowerBuilder, VB6 Job Trends

Powerbuilder jobs - Vb6 jobs

And then there's this.  A company that offers training in "legacy technologies" (including PowerBuilder) so that developers who are having trouble finding a job or are not getting paid what they want can find jobs easier and for higher pay.