Chris Pollach's Blog

The Ottawa Sybase User Group was proud to be the first in North America to host the formal PowerBuilder 11 Launch Tour event! Joining us from Sybase USA for this special event were John Strano, Dave Fish, Jim O'Neil and Sue Dunnell (Launch Team). You can read all about them and the meeting agenda, by following this link (click here ). The OSUG meeting was attended by just over 60 people in the morning ranging from development managers, team leaders, developers, business analysts, etc. The turn-out was perfect as this was the comfortable limit for the Queens University lecture theatre.

The meeting was started by OSUG Co-Ordinator Chris Pollach who greeted everyone on behalf of the OSUG and ISUG associations. Chris mentioned that all individuals that hold an updated ISUG membership will automatically receive as part of their already free $7,000 worth of Sybase software the updated PB 11 software when it is publicly released. PowerBuilder Senior Product  Manager Sue Dunnell announced to the attendees that PB 11 GA (General Availability) is now scheduled internally at Sybase to be available for June 8th, 2007 for the electronic version. The full release to compact disc and formal packaging will take another few weeks after that. Chris then used John Strano in a Martial Art demonstration! John was the .Net Framework with Dave Fish as the PB Developer and Jim O'Neil as the Visual Studio developer. John was instructed to apply a dual hand-hold on Dave and Jim and then asked them to break free. After allot struggling, Chris stepped in as PB11.Net and DW.Net and showed how various tools (techniques) could be used to "leverage" bio mechanics - or in the application development world, the .Net framework. The key point here being that the right tool can make easier so that even a small child could control John. This was a metaphor for how PB 11 and DW.Net can make your life easier when dealing with a complex object.

Chris then introduced the Launch Team members and held up a diskette of PowerBuilder release 1.0. He then gave a quick summary of the feature high-lights of various PB versions from 1.0 through until 10.5. Chris also mentioned that along with PowerBuilder 11, each developer was also receiving a  copy of the SQLAnyWhere version 10 database (formerly known as ASA). This new DBMS release alone has over 200 new features! So added to the already enormous amount of new features of PB 11, the total PB 11 development tool package will certainly be "value packed"!

For the morning session, Dave and John presented all the new features of PB 11 in a tag team approach that was interlaced with various demonstrations of interacting with the .Net framework and also exploiting some of the new IDE features, scripting enhancements, GUI changes, etc. You can see a detailed feature review of PB 11 by clicking here ! During the coffee breaks Dave and John were also busy fielding questions from various developers on how to apply various new features and techniques within PB 11 into the .Net realm. The PB 11 presentation covered all the bases and during the coffee breaks you could hear the attendees buzzing with excitement!

During the lunch hour a buffet was served that was just delicious. This also gave all the attendees the chance to in-formerely discuss what they had seen in the morning sessions about PB 11. All the attendees also received a PB 11 "Get Traction" and SDN (courtesy of ISUG) T-Shirts, copies of PocketBuilder 2.0, PowerBuilder 10.5, PowerDesigner 12, ASE 15, etc and of course PB 11. We were also able to meet representatives from Quest and Novalys software who were also able to talk about their products that interface with Sybase's DBMS and PowerBuilder products. Also during this period, attendees who were planning to stay for the afternoons CodeCamp were instructed on how to load and configure PB 11 on to their laptops.

For the afternoons CodeCamp, Dave and John walked through many of the feature examples and coding. Jim O'Neil was also on hand to help people install and code the various PB 11 features, while Sue Dunnell jumped in at various times to answer product future directional questions from the audience. Dave and John were also able to show allot more details about features covered lightly in the morning session, plus hand out many new code examples that even the Beta testers had never seen! They also walked around with Jim helping the developers and answering more questions (click here ).

By the end of the day, all the attendees agreed that they had gained a vast amount of knowledge about this new release. Chris Pollach also closed out the session with presentations to the Launch Team of some souvenier Ottawa Senators helmets - donated by Frank Lawrence CEO of Mini-Lids corporation.  Vannessa Buderick of NSERC was also the winner of the door prize - a personally autographed helmet ... Congratulations! The end of the meeting wrapped up with a final Question and Answer period with applause for a job well done for the entire Launch Team!