Monday, March 17, 2008

From PowerBuilder to .NET

They say all good things come to an end. It looks like PowerBuilder is one of those good things.

Rapid application development has always been important to business and PowerBuilder has to be among the most successful RAD products of all times. But it's time to move on. "PowerBuilder for .NET" doesn't seem to be gaining traction. What's a career PowerBuilder jockey supposed to do? Do you have to take a big productivity hit and also climb the whole .NET learning curve all at once?

Maybe it's not so bad. My company, IdeaBlade, is hosting a MSDN Webinar on Migrating from PowerBuilder to .NET It's a panel discussion among some experts who've been down this path before. I can vouch for two of them personally, Sean Flynn and Chuck Miller, having spent long hours with both. I haven't met the Microsoft guy, Terry Clancy, but I've heard good things about him. The fourth fellow, Jay Traband, is our CTO so you know I've got to be kind despite the fact that he and I have been jawing at each other since 1986 :-)

If PowerBuilder is your cup of tea, you definitely should register and attend on Wednesday, April 2, 2008, 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm amazed. Not a single comment after all this time? Maybe everyone really has moved off of PB and I'm left to turn off the lights.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Wait for PB 12.0 which is expected to be released around mid 2009. Looks like it will provide partitioning capabilities and also provide complete .net support and a fully managed code datawindow. See link below for the presentation.

http://events.digitallyspeaking.com/techwave2008/pln801.html

Regards,
sns

Global Warming said...

HI,
am used PB8 , now shift into PB10. any one tell me what is the main difference.

urs,
Gobi

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Long time PB developer. Still think nothing beats PB for RAD. Nothing! However, the writing is on the wall and I don't think Sybase can read it. Too many issues to discuss. I'm hoping 12 can change things, but what I have seen leaves me thinking it is not going to happen. I've heard the hype before, and all we get are wrappers and band-aids. I want to see a pure implementation!

WPF is the only thing I think could save them, but it would require them opening up to third party control and plug-in providers which they haven't done well with, in the past.

Another thing, Sybase needs to become more transparent and open to their user base regarding suggestions, bugs, questions. I've had very bad experiences with their support and we own 20 Enterprise licenses with annual support renewal. Sometimes improvements to a product is not enough.

We'll see.

Chris.

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