Swiss PowerBuilder User Group Meeting - May 5, 2014

The meeting was held as SAP's offices in Regensdorf, a suburb of Zurich.

The meeting started with Sue Dunnell and Dave Fish discussing the status of PowerBuilder, and in particular the beta.

• 235 people signed up for beta.  Small for PB, but big for SAP
• Other products are looking to follow same process, also complaining about S-user requirement

After that, Dave Fish demonstrated the following features in the beta version of PowerBuilder 15

• OData
• 64 bit support (Native)
• Dockable Windows
• HTML5 DataWindow

That was followed by my presentation on using visual controls (PB.Net in VS.Net, VS.Net in PB Classic).  We then broke for lunch.  After lunch, Jan Lemmens of SAP then gave an overview of application development with HANA.  After that, Dave Fish presenting SAPUI5 and OpenUI5.  Finally, Dave Fish demonstrated Android support in Appeon.

Communication with a smart card from PowerBuilder

We're going to look at using the Smart Card SDK provided in more recent versions of Windows (XP and later).  Earlier versions of Windows had an ActiveX installed called CAPICOM which could be accessed from PowerBuilder through OLE Automation, but that control was removed as of Windows Vista because of security issues.

We're going to look at a number of operations:

• Communication with the card
• Validating the user's PIN
• Reading the certificate Subject Name
• Reading other certificate data

A collection of PowerBuilder resources

• All of my PowerBuilder samples, including the source code for the demos I've done at various conferences are available in the PowerBuilder Samples folder on my Google Drive: http://goo.gl/VXouQ
• The PowerBuilder Developer's Journal may have gone away, but I'm going a free "magazine" on FlipBoard. It's basically just collection of articles from all over the internet on PowerBuilder: http://goo.gl/Mrd3Ql
• I've done a number of videos for the SAP Database and Technology Academy. The PowerBuilder related videos, including mine, are available at: http://goo.gl/53pe7a 
• I've done a number of webinars for PowerBuilder.TV. The archives of the webinars related to PowerBuilder, including mine, are available at: http://goo.gl/IUHN1N
• Also, don't forget the PowerBuilder Developer Center, where a bunch of us hang out to answer questions, write blogs and documents: http://goo.gl/DtaS58 
• You might also want to check out the PowerBuilder Central site. It's an attempt to collect references to different resources like this and make the available in a central location: http://goo.gl/WVyNo7 
• If you're looking for PowerBuilder training, be sure to check out Yakov Werde's training offerings (as well as his consulting services) at: elearnitonline.com