Tools

PFC Project Partitioning Using a Referenced PowerBuilder Assembly Target

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:30:00 EST

Paul Harvey, the great American radio personality, would always conclude his colorful broadcasts with the quip “And now you know the rest of the story.” For those of you not acquainted with Paul’s broadcasts, here’s a sample. If you get to about 3:40 in, you’ll hear the classic remark. Paraphrasing Paul’s tag line, in this article you’ll learn “the rest of the story” about RAD Development methodology in PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET using a Referenced PB Assembly Target. I’ll explain the technique and implementation steps using the open source PEAT PFC demo application. In a previous PBDJ article, “Slicing the Pie with PowerBuilder .NET 12.1 EBF Project Partitioning” (http://yakovwerde.ulitzer.com/node/1740373), I wrote about achieving Classic RAD-like build/test speeds in .NET WPF applications by configuring the Project object partitioning feature. This feature lets you logically carve up a large application into a small manageable-sized executable with a set of related PowerBuilder assemblies that are automatically generated at full build-time via the Project Object. Although, once configured, you can benefit from RAD speed incremental compiles when making changes to your non-framework code, this approach has several disadvantages. First, it can take a lot of developer time, knowledge of the application and several trial and error attempts to configure the feature. Second, since both the framework and the concrete application are in the same target, an inadvertent save to a framework object will cause a full build on the entire application to occur. Third, a flaw in the incremental compile process causes a bunch of meaningless compiler errors to be reported when changing code in a visual object. The only way to clear the situation is by doing a full build (thereby giving up all compile time advantages).

The Development of a Perl-based Password Complexity Filter

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:00:00 EDT

If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to notice that in almost any given week some company seems to have experienced an electronic break-in or in some other way experienced a form of computer or network compromise. While computer security professionals can help to mitigate such risks via the proper configuration of firewalls, careful crafting of Access Control Lists, the application of updates, and the judicious application of file permission, among other measures, it’s important that one of the most fundamental ways of improving the security of a computer or network resource not be overlooked – that of a really strong password. To this day passwords remain one of the weaker links in the security of electronic resources, and their potential for exploitation needs to be examined more carefully than ever. With the growing trend of cloud computing-based initiatives, many resources that were formerly enclosed within the wall of a business are now available over a network, thereby mitigating the physical security measures the previously helped to limit access to such resources. Given that many of these cloud-based solutions are accessed via user name and password combinations, a strong password is often the primary form of defense against illicit access.

The Importance of Unit Testing in C++

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:15:00 EDT

Unit testing is a best practice in any modern methodology, including Agile development. With automatic unit testing in place, if we introduce a bug into the software, one or more tests will fail and we'll know about it immediately. We've been writing in C++ for almost 30 years now, and we use software development tools, which improved over time. Yet, because of the intricacies of C++ and its different variants, testing tools did not become as advanced as Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET tools, or Eclipse for Java. For example, the testing tooling for C++ in Visual Studio lags behind the tools for the other languages supported in Visual Studio.

Context Switching in the IT World Can Be Harmful to Schedules

Wed, 18 May 2011 07:00:00 EDT

One of the biggest issues I see in a lot of IT / Software Development environments is the lack of understanding when it comes to context switching. There are a lot of managers that don't understand how much work is lost when they expect their team to multitask. More disastrous is the interruption that could have been an email or voice mail. I rarely answer my phone and shut down email when I want to concentrate. Cubes have wrecked the ability to focus. My current cube is totally open and I am surrounded by a support team that have a line waiting to talk to them sometimes. When I was in the electronic engineering field we had offices. When the door was closed that meant you were in a meeting or deep into your work. Unless it was an emergency, rarely was there a knock. You'd get a polite email asking for you to let them know when you were free.

Goodbye .NET Reflector

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:15:00 EST

It was nice while it lasted. I received the email below this afternoon announcing a $35 charge will soon be in place. From this forum, it looks like Red-gate was hoping for a big pay day from Microsoft. Quote from the forum: "Right now I'm hoping MS wakes up to the importance of Reflector in .NET and realizes they have a severe gap in the SDK without Reflector. I hope they either acquire this software and include in the SDK or create something similar."

Book Review: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:08:48 EST

This is a book that would be good for anyone that wants to get a snapshot of the current Microsoft technology stack. It gives decent primers on Window Communication Foundation (WCF) 4.0 and Windows Workflow (WF) 4.0, Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk, SQL Server, and Windows Azure. The primers are thorough enough to give you a decent understanding of each technology. The book then covers common scenarios found in most enterprise level applications. The scenarios include, Simple Workflow, Content-based Routing, Publish-Subscribe, Repair/Resubmit with Human Workflow, Remote Message Broadcasting, Debatching Bulk Data, Complex Event Processing, Cross-Organizational Supply Chain, Multiple Master Synchronization, Rapid Flexible Scalability, Low-Latency Request-Reply, Handling Large Session and Reference Data, and Website Load Burst and Failover.

To HTML5, or Not to HTML5, That Is the Question

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:15:00 EST

If you’ve been following Sybase’s announcements concerning their plans for future versions of PowerBuilder, you’ll know that they are planning for PowerBuilder 15 to be able to generate a Silverlight application and are looking at having it generate applications based on HTML5 as well. If you’ve been following this column, you’ll know I’ve been arguing that we need Silverlight generation much sooner than that. Back in November of 2008[1], I suggested that by the time PowerBuilder 12 was delivered, Microsoft would have Silverlight 3 out and it would be much more stable and ubiquitous. PowerBuilder 12 is here, and Microsoft is actually already on Silverlight 4. According to statowl.com, Silverlight was installed in 20% of browsers in November of 2008 and is now installed in 56% of browsers. Riastats.com indicates that Silverlight 4 is installed in 56% of browsers, and that Silverlight 3 is installed in another 6.5%. The bottom line is that Silverlight is now mainstream technology and the player is already installed in approximately two out of every three browsers. It’s also available on phones based on the Windows Mobile 7 or Symbian operating systems. Finally, there are rumors flying about support for a player on Android and perhaps even iPhone, but nothing definite yet.

Microsoft Cloud Channel Conflict - Deja Vu All Over Again

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:30:00 EDT

Microsoft's Office 365 announcement yesterday made it unclear how big a role service providers might play in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem. One executive said provider partners, like telcos and hosting services, are essential to the reliability and functional richness they can add to Microsoft applications in the cloud. Another didn't even mention them, touting instead Microsoft's own data centers and service goals. Telcos can potentially offer 99.999% up-time, while Microsoft will only commit to 99.9%, a one hundred-fold difference between ten minutes and six seconds of downtime per week, respectively. We have seen this many times before with Microsoft, a big gap between strong potential and weak reality. Ironically, it has been a key to their past success, but will it work in the cloud?

Are We Headed in the Right Direction?

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EDT

Sybase is currently in the middle of the most aggressive marketing program that I’ve seen for PowerBuilder in recent history. If you’ve been following my blog (and if you haven’t you should) you’ll know that Sybase recently ran a four-page ad in Visual Studio magazine promoting the release of PowerBuilder 12 (http://xrl.us/bhmxfe). They’ve also been conducting a worldwide series of “Developer Days” promoting PowerBuilder 12 and a number of other Sybase products. One of the things they show during that road show is a rather tentative “road map” of which features are planned for future versions of PowerBuilder (http://xrl.us/bhmxfr). The release of PowerBuilder 12 triggered some complaints about some of the features that were removed with that release (primarily support for creating COM and COM+ components). Associated with that were complaints about features currently supported in “classic” PowerBuilder targets that are not supported in the .NET targets (e.g., data pipelines). There were also some complaints that the requests in the ISUG enhancement system (http://my.isug.com/enhancements) weren’t being adequately considered.

Refactoring Classic PowerBuilder Applications Using TDD and pbUnit

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:45:00 EDT

The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. In my previous article, “Refactoring Is Not an ‘R’ Word” (PBDJ, Vol. 16, issue 12), you read why refactoring code before migration helps ensure smooth migration and enterprise integration. You were introduced to Test Driven Development methodology and saw how you can use it to ensure successful refactoring. You were also introduced to pbUnit, an open source tool and framework that you can use for both refactoring and developing new code in PB Classic applications. In this article I’ll guide you through installing pbUnit and help you master the basic algorithm when refactoring your PB legacy code with pbUnit and test driven methodology. In addition to installing and using pbUnit with Classic PowerBuilder to run unit Tests, you’ll also learn how to get your code under test so you can go about refactoring your code with confidence. After that, I’ll show you how to do a couple of refactorings to thin out a GUI and partition business and data logic

Microsoft Endorses Hybrid Models to Facilitate Cloud Transition

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:33:31 EDT

Not long ago Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying that Microsoft is "betting the company" on cloud computing. So it is really no surprise that at the company's TechEd 2010 event in New Orleans, the software giant reprised the same theme. Bob Muglia, Microsoft's president of servers and tools advised users to adopt a hybrid cloud model to ease the transition into cloud based networks. Key to tackling the challenge, he said, is for customers to strike the right balance between traditional software-based server architectures managed by the customer or a partner, the vast power and near limitless scalability of cloud services powered remotely by giant server warehouses, and a hybrid model that blends the two. Muglia highlighted all of Microsoft's existing flagship software tools that have migrated to the Azure cloud platform namely Microsoft Systems Center, Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7 and software from the acquisition of Opalis in 2009 and other .Net cloud partner offerings.The new version 4 of .Net that will be available from this week lets developers specify if they want an application to run on the cloud or internally. Muglia admitted that the present versions of Microsoft applications on Azure such as Windows Azure and SQL Azure were less than perfect as they do not have all the features of the corresponding standard software editions but assured that these disparities are being worked on. Other cloud related enhancements include an updated Windows Azure software development kit (SDK) with support for Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Visual Studio 2010 RTM support, and IntelliTrace support available at http://www.windowsazure.com. The company will be offering spatial data support and access to 50 GB of SQL Azure Database capacity for higher scalability and a Microsoft SQL Server Web Manager tool for data-driven applications on the cloud.

Using .NET in PowerBuilder.NET

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:00:00 EDT

When the beta for PB.NET (PowerBuilder 12) started I was pretty excited to get my hands on it. This version comes with a whole new IDE and with it many new features. As a result, we now get to take advantage of things like better intellisense, script navigation functions, and a WPF editor for better UI design and development. Most important was the promise of being able to use the .NET Framework to its nearly full potential. What I want to do with this article is walk you through the source code of an application I built; an application that uses some parts of .NET (see Figure 1). Its main purpose is to take a list of image files and scale their dimensions down based on a percentage of the original size. This will essentially reduce their size, allowing you to upload them to your favorite photo sharing site much quicker. In addition to scaling the images this solution will also allow you to rotate them. You can download the complete solution here: http://www.werysoft.com/PBImageScaler.zip.

VS2010 Load Testing for Distributed and Heterogeneous Applications

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:29:05 EDT

Visual Studio 2010 is almost here – Microsoft just released the first Release Candidate which looks pretty solid and good. Microsoft added new interfaces for performance management solutions like dynaTrace to extend the Web- and Load-Testing capabilities (check out Ed Glas’s blog on what’s in VSTS Load Testing) to go beyond .NET environments and deeper than what Load Testing Reports tell you about the performance of the tested application. But before we go into what can be done by extending Visual Studio – lets have a look of what we get out of the box:

Windows XP Installation Issues on ACPI Enabled System

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:52:00 EST

ACPI or Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is an industry power management specification. It enables an operating system to control the amount of power required to be given to each device that is connected to the computer system. Thus, it eliminates device management responsibilities for firmware interfaces. However, when ACPI is enabled, your system BIOS might create issues. These problems are typically observed when you try to install Windows XP on your computer. You might be compelled to perform clean installation of Windows XP in such cases to solve the problem. Since the process deletes all the data that is stored on the hard disk, you will need to restore it from the recent data backup available. At times, backup might prove incompetent to restore the required files and folders. To cope up with such problems, you need to use an efficient data recovery tool that could extract the data thus lost

Microsoft Expression Web Has Got Game

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:45:00 EDT

In 2006 Microsoft began releasing a series of designer focused tools. The big question was: Why? Adobe has the best tools, doesn’t it? There is no doubt that Adobe’s tools are very good, what is clear, however, is that Microsoft is taking design seriously for this to be accomplished Microsoft does need tools that work well with their own tools. An immediate designer’s pain point for Microsoft is the millions of ASP.NET developers who have only Visual Studio 2005/2008 to design their Web applications with. If you have used Visual Studio as a design tool, then you know what I mean.

PowerBuilder and .NET: Development Strategy

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Nowadays .NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be inline with PowerBuilder’s .NET deployment and .NET development strategy, the PowerScript language will be enhanced to be a true CLS-compliant .NET language in PowerBuilder 12. Users will be able to consume and extend any CLS-compliant .NET resource, thereby saving them a lot of development time.

Getting Started with Silverlight: Zero to Hero

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:00:00 EST

Lots of people have been asking about how to get started with Silverlight, and what they need to do to get up and running with Silverlight quickly. Inspired by blog posts such as Jesse Liberty's, I'm going to take this from first principles, with no prior knowledge assumed. So let's get started with the first and most simple application - a 'Hello World' in Silverlight. You need no special tools for this. Just notepad will do...

Quickstart: Building User-Configurable ASP.NET Web Parts

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:00:00 EST

For more than 20 years the software development industry has regarded reuse as the Holy Grail of software development. Programming language-based object-oriented features promised to deliver the significant benefits of increased productivity and cost-effectiveness by creating reusable objects, but in industry-wide practice OO itself hasn't delivered the results we hoped for.

Effective Database Change Management

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:00:00 EST

Have you ever been on a project where software development worked beautifully but developing and maintaining the database always caused unexpected problems and bugs? Do your changes constantly get overwritten by other developers, or is only one person at a time allowed to make changes? Do you find, after two or three major releases, that it's impossible to create upgrade scripts for existing production databases? After experiencing these frustrations and more, I decided to address them.

Overcome the Frustrating Lack of .NET Deployment Tools

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:30:00 EDT

Developing custom applications using Microsoft's .NET Framework is a growing trend. According to Forrester Research, 56% of enterprises are choosing .NET versus 44% opting for J2EE, while IDC reports that 35.7% of large corporations use .NET for their most important applications compared to 25.3% for Java. While .NET lets your development team develop applications quickly and efficiently, it's still a challenge to make sure that:

.NET Application Logging Mechanism

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 04:45:00 EDT

In application development, one should consider an effective way of creating a standard rule for coding and debugging. For all the information provided in the application code, there's a better way for developers to track down a problem and find a solution.

Flash ASP.NET

Wed, 17 May 2006 12:15:00 EDT

As the World Wide Web's landscape has evolved from the days of multimedia-void static HMTL pages, the need for a dynamic interactive medium for Web applications has become apparent. Adobe Flash, as many developers know, is the most widely distributed, capable technology for achieving this new Internet medium.

Collaboration on Steroids with WPF, Office 2007, and SharePoint 2007

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:00:00 EDT

This document describes an application currently being constructed with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (OSS) that will enable collaboration between cancer researchers called the C-ME project (Collaborative Molecular Modeling Environment). Office 2007 with Visual Studio Tools for Office v3.0 (VSTO) will be used to generate reports from the information stored in OSS. The C-ME project is being built for cancer researchers. Curing cancer is a complex and lengthy process, and the collaborative tools researchers need don't exist. This document describes the problems of collaboration faced by cancer researchers and the technical approaches being taken to bridge the gap.

ComponentArt Releases Charting for .NET Version 2006.1

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 10:15:00 EDT

ComponentArt has released version 2006.1 of its next-generation 3D charting line: ComponentArt Charting for .NET. The release consists of WebChart for ASP.NET for web-based solutions, and WinChart for .NET for Windows Forms development, and the controls are available individually or together as a bundle. With the release of version 2006.1 the ComponentArt Charting line now supports the advanced features of .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

Introducing XML or Non-XML Based Creative Modeler In Microsoft .NET

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:45:00 EST

Creative Modeler is a full-featured diagramming environment that can be extended to create any type of diagram. It includes a data translation engine that facilitates the editing and conversion of data in any structured file format into any other structured file format (XML or non-XML). The automation API is based on .NET and XML/XSL. This article will discuss how Creative Modeler can be used to edit arbitrary data in a visual format.

Using Spec Explorer for Model-Based Test Development

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:15:00 EST

If you are developer who writes code to test software, you might want to consider using Spec Explorer. Spec Explorer is a model-based testing tool available for free through Microsoft Research that you use to model the software you're testing and create test harnesses and test case suites (http://research.microsoft.com/SpecExplorer/).

Automatic Integration with CruiseControl.NET, NAnt, and NUnit

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 17:15:00 EST

One of the most important and yet overlooked aspects of a software development project is the concept of regression testing during implementation. Regression testing is the practice of running tests for previously tested code following modification to ensure that faults have not been introduced or uncovered as a result of the changes made. In this article I will outline the need for continuous integration, automated builds, and testing, which support the tenets of regression testing and provide automation for the process. I will also introduce some of the free open source tools that can be used to effectively employ a continuous integration process, and we'll take a look at a scenario that demonstrates their use.

An Introduction to MySQL, LAMP Stack and Microsoft Windows Development

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:45:00 EST

When open source software is mentioned, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python). While these products are not generally associated with Windows development, at least one of them is certainly well suited for Windows development, particularly when using .NET. The MySQL database server is an open source relational database developed by MySQL AB. MySQL is available for Windows, Linux, UNIX, and the Macintosh operating system. Using MySQL with Windows has never been easier with .NET and ADO.NET.

Put Your Next Project on Cruise Control

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:15:00 EST

This article is the first in a three-part series on the use of CruiseControl.NET, a very popular and important tool for any development house interested in implementing continuous integration and other agile programming concepts. In this first installment we'll briefly cover the definition and use of continuous integration (CI), some of the other CI tools available, and the basic setup and operation of CruiseControl.NET. While these articles will cover the core elements of CruiseControl.NET, we will be covering only a small portion of its functionality and you are encouraged to read through the excellent online documentation.

Derek Ferguson on "Pragmatic Unit Testing" An Introduction to NMock

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 06:30:00 EDT

I differentiate what I like to call 'pragmatic unit testing' from the two alternate approaches to unit testing that I have seen at organizations. The first 'alternate approach,' which I have seen at 95 percent of .NET organizations, is best referred to as 'no time for quality.' The other approach, which I have mainly seen at J2EE organizations, can be labeled 'quality, even if it puts us out of business.'

AVIcode's Intercept Studio Enhancing Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 10:15:00 EDT

As software development teams and solutions become more distributed, visibility into systems has given way to isolated pockets of component knowledge. This 'silo' approach to application development, where different teams work in isolation from each other, means that developers may no longer have knowledge of, or access to, the code with which their component interacts. This results in duplication of efforts and incomplete solutions due to a lack of information sharing.

.NET Development with Visual Build Pro

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:00:00 EDT

I have used Microsoft Visual Studio at various companies over the years, starting with Visual Basic 3 to create simple, stand-alone Windows applications, then later using Visual Basic 5 and 6 for multitiered development. More recently, I've used Visual C++ to create a commercial application, and have recently been doing extensive .NET development using C# for both WinForms and ASP.NET development.

Engineering + Reuse = Savings

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 09:00:00 EDT

Why are contract outsourcing and offshore development failing to deliver the expected benefit of lower costs and increased end-user satisfaction to enterprise software development users? It seems that lower rates per hour and better management of human resources are not enough to overcome the problems associated with the central issue of lack of engineering discipline. In most other industries, real cost savings matched with increased productivity that translate into fundamentally lower production costs have been the result of process and manufacturing reengineering, not simply of lowering labor input costs. The cost of building a car has actually declined in real dollars over the last 20 years, even as average hourly pay has increased.

Microsoft .NET - Object-Relational Mapping with Codus

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:30:00 EDT

If you've spent more than two months developing any form of software, chances are you've had to program against a database. Unfortunately, despite the rapid gains in software sophistication over the past decade, few well-recognized tools are available to deal with the problem of object-relational mapping, often referred to as the 'impedance mismatch.'

Crystal Reports XI & How It Has Changed

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Microsoft's bundling of Crystal Reports dates to Visual Basic 3 and since then many developers have come to rely on it to build reporting solutions. Early on some developers found the programming API too complicated and there were the typical deployment problems that happen with any product that has many versions and upgrades.

Truly Reusable Code: Assembly Binding Redirection in .NET

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

When I first read that .NET assemblies could be 'redirected' at runtime, I was stunned and a little bit suspicious. After all, in the COM world the intricacies of component interaction had baffled me, but I knew enough to know that dynamic redirection just wasn't possible. To be honest, I relied on Visual Basic's Binary Compatibility mode to do the job and hoped for the best.

Developing Web Parts Using the SharePoint Object Model

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Since the first article ('Developing Web Parts') in this series appeared in July 2003 (Vol. 1, issue 7), Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) have been launched as part of the Microsoft Office System. After the successful launch and much adoption, SharePoint products and technologies have allowed collaboration to become a large part of distributed applications in a simplified way.

Great Data Grids I Have Known

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST

Data table displays are the workhorses of transaction- based Web applications. So why are they so hard to build, especially since .NET provides a built-in ASP.NET DataGrid control?