Xue-song Wu

From the PowerBuilder forums I've discovered that quite a few people are requesting a feature that allows them to write console applications with PowerBuilder. PowerBuilder doesn't support this feature natively right now, but we can already do it with PowerBuilder 9Swith the help of PBNI. There are two reasons you can't create console applications with the PowerBuilder IDE. One, PowerBuilder doesn't provide functions or classes for writing strings to a console and getting input from the console; two, the executables created by the PowerBuilder IDE are always for Windows GUI applications. Fortunately, both problems can be solved using PBNI technology. First we write a PBNI extension that exposes a PB native class named console that provides functions for getting input from the console and writing output to the console. Then we write a small console stub in C++ that ... (more)

Using .NET XML API in PowerBuilder

XML is becoming the standard for data exchange. More and more software products and technologies are being built on top of it. Even the newest buzz word in Internet programming- AJAX - is related to XML. The good news is that .NET framework provides a very powerful API for manipulating XML, and you, as a PowerBuilder developer, can leverage on that API through the .NET interoperability feature released in PowerBuilder 11. In this article, I will walk you through a code sample, showing how to: Read and write XML files, Traverse a XML DOM tree, and Query XML data using XPath. The c... (more)

Using .NET XML API

XML is becoming the standard for data exchange. More and more software products and technologies are being built on top of it. Even the newest buzz word in Internet programming- AJAX - is related to XML. The good news is that .NET framework provides a very powerful API for manipulating XML, and you, as a PowerBuilder developer, can leverage on that API through the .NET interoperability feature released in PowerBuilder 11. In this article, I will walk you through a code sample, showing how to: Read and write XML files, Traverse a XML DOM tree, and Query XML data using XPath. The c... (more)

PowerBuilder in a .NET World

NET is becoming (or rather it has already become) a mainstream application development platform for developing both Windows Forms applications and Web applications, and more and more companies have adopted the .NET technology. Sybase anticipated this trend two years ago and developed a PowerBuilder .NET strategy. In that strategy, we decided to support .NET in four major steps. In the first step, we released with PowerBuilder 9 a PBNI extension called the WebServiceClient that enables PowerBuilder to consume .NET Web services. In the second step, we released a new product - DataWi... (more)

Writing Console Applications with PowerBuilder 9

From the PowerBuilder forums I've discovered that quite a few people are requesting a feature that allows them to write console applications with PowerBuilder. PowerBuilder doesn't support this feature natively right now, but we can already do it with PowerBuilder 9Swith the help of PBNI. There are two reasons you can't create console applications with the PowerBuilder IDE. One, PowerBuilder doesn't provide functions or classes for writing strings to a console and getting input from the console; two, the executables created by the PowerBuilder IDE are always for Windows GUI app... (more)