Microsoft .NET

Sybase PowerBuilder 12 released for .NET application development

Sybase Inc. announced the release of PowerBuilder 12, a .NET development tool. PowerBuilder 12 was created based on the need for an open .NET development tool that delivers applications without limitations of end-to-end managed code.

PowerBuilder provides 12 new key features including open database support, rewritten DataWindow and Visual Inheritance for WPF and User Objects. Sybase will ship PowerBuilder with two self-contained modules, one designed for Windows 32-based development and a comprehensive module for developing Windows Presentation Foundation-based applications on top of the Microsoft Visual Studio shell. 

For those of us who have been in application development since before the 1990s, we remember PowerBuilder as the premier client/server development environment.  Its affiliation with Microsoft is an interesting twist for this venerable tool.  While PowerBuilder has seen better days, it still remains a viable legacy IDE and language for building distributed applications.

Find additional information about signing up for the PowerBuilder 12 beta program here: www.sybase.com/powerbuilder12beta

Microsoft PDC 2009 registration opens

By Peter Varhol

Microsoft has opened registration for its 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) (http://www.microsoftpdc.com), to be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center November 17-19^th.  This follows the PDC that the company had October of last year.

The interesting thing about the PDC is that Microsoft doesn’t have one every year.  Rather, this is a conference where Microsoft waits until it believes it has something to talk about from a developer standpoint before hosting the conference.  In the past, the company has used the PDC as a vehicle for preparing developers for new and groundbreaking development technologies or platforms.

Further, the PDC topics focus on the future, usually 12 to 24 months in the future.  While Microsoft does not seem to be giving a lot of hints about what these future development trends may entail, there are at least a couple of sessions that look intriguing.

The biggest thing I see is a talk by Stephen Taub.  It’s entitled Manycore and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4: A Match Made in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, The Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 include new technologies for expressing, debugging, and tuning parallelism in managed applications.

Another featured session, given by Steve Marx, is Building Applications for the Windows Azure Platform.  Last year, Azure was just so much smoke and mirrors.  A year later, hopefully there is some more here for developers to sink their teeth into.