Re: Is there a future after PowerBuilder 12.6?

Hi Chris,

Ha that´s great! I also won some Spanish lottery (120 €, finally!), but the only problem is that meanwhile, I´ve left Spain to accept a job in the UK, so don´t know how I´m gonna collect it . I wrote the previous message right after listening to the 2nd webinar of Appeon about Powerbuilder´s future. It might work out, but we´ve been harassed too much: first there was webforms 2.0, then it was taken out, now it seems we´re going to have something alike again. Lately I´ve been evaluating Appeon and I think it really is a great product, no doubt that powerbuilder will be better off in Appeon´s hands, but still "something" also tells me that .Net might be the way to go. According to webinar 2, powerbuilder will be able to do certain stuff through COM, but who trusts guarantees that in near future Microsoft won´t be making certain stuff obsolete? (OLE, Mapi, etc.) 

"Something": Appeon also has a way of not being totally straight forward, so that´s not too convincing either: they´ve been telling me that "I can use EA Server to distribute pb nvo´s" but they suddenly forget to mention that EA server will be EOL soon. Then they talk about OData, other things and also 64bit support, but forget to mention that OData is not supporting 64 bit, just like Mapi.

For now, the company I work for, luckily wants to keep working with pb, but at the same time, we´re thinking of downgrading to 12.5 which seems a lot less buggy. The other day, when

    1) reporting about Mapi not working well and leaving the executable running in the background processes of windows (after doing a send) the answer of SAP was that "on their computer everything worked fine". Oh yes... it does, once of every 20 executions, but still .. a lot slower.

    2) Using "Data.primary.original", to replace the contents of a dw, results in sporadic "funny chinese characters", unless you assign it first to an "any" variable (in debug it might still show the funny chars). And I now also have to check first if there were any rows before using the "data.primary.original" since it´ll blow up if not, and last but not least of my previous 10 days working with 12.6:

    3) There are differences in the compiler when checking the script of a script without ancestor and when you do have an ancestor:

This following code, compiles in the CHILD script, but will blow up powerbuilder IDE after exiting:

    string ls_gonna_blowup

    ls_gonna_blowup // invalid statement, but compiles, fills the string with again "funny chinese chars"

    int li_dummy

    string ls_should_be_an_empty_string

    // put your debug stop right here:

    ls_should_be_an_empty_string = ls_gonna_blowup

    ls_should_be_an_empty_string = ls_should_be_an_empty_string // it´s NOT

In a parent script, it correctly warns about "invalid statement" in the child event, the same code is "okay" for the compiler.

Now I know, this is a very unlikely and unusual thing to do, but it sort of happened to me, putting the "// &" on the right instead of left, of a series of variable declarations, being slowly connected through vpn and the mouse pad being enabled. (in other words, I made a mistake that compiled perfectly).

What worries me about the chinese characters, is that fundamentally there´s something wrong with the memory protection/management/unicode? of datawindows, using DATA, and that the compiler is buggy. I also get the feeling that the behaviour of pb IDE and EXE are more different than ever before.

Let Appeon take over PB now and "do well" on a short term, or I´m afraid people are going to avoid it as hell.

When I´m hearing all of the awaiting changes for PB that appeon has in mind, it seems hard to me to trust in the "do well on a short term", since the product at this stage is too buggy to simply take over, it first needs fixing.

I´m waiting for a few weeks to see what SAP does with my reported incidents, but if nothing comes out, I´ll seriously recommend my bosses to step back to 12.5 and stay away from newer versions until they prove stable and solid.

Kind regards,

Miguel Leeuwe

(so ... if we put together out lotteries and wait long enough, we even might be able to buy the pb product )