The original Rich Text Editing control shipped with PowerBuilder was based on an OEM of a popular third party control at the time called HighEdit. By the time 10.5 came out though, that control was quite dated and no longer supported by the vendor. As a result, in 2006 Sybase replaced that control with an OEM of another popular third party control called TX Text Control. There are licensing issues with that control though.  So with the release of PowerBuilder 2017 Appeon updated the control again, replacing the OEM of the TX Text Control with an OEM of the TE Edit Control. Note that if you encounter regressions with the new control you can switch back to the TX Text Control through a new RichTextEdit option in the Additional Properties dialog for the application object.  If you do however, you will have to obtain your own license of TX Text Control.

Are any of the windows in your PowerBuilder applications “haunted” by ghosts?

In the Windows operating system, the term “ghosting” is used to describe how the Desktop Window Manager visually intervenes on a user’s behalf whenever Windows believes the active, or "top-level" application window has become unresponsive. This article describes how Windows determines if a window should be ghosted and how the appearance of a window changes when it becomes ghosted. The article will also examine the common causes of an unresponsive PowerBuilder window and discuss some options for detecting, recovering from and even preventing windows with long-running processes from being ghosted.

Let’s start where most things begin… at the beginning – with an overview of the role of messages and message queues in an event-driven operating system.

In this article you will find a list of Code Samples related to DataWindows for your PowerBuilder apps. These code examples are found at Appeon's CodeXChange.

In this article you will find a list of Code Samples related to UI Modernization of your PowerBuilder apps. These code examples are found at Appeon's CodeXChange.

In this article you will find a list of Code Samples related to API Enablement of your PowerBuilder apps. These code examples are found at Appeon's CodeXChange.

In this article you will find a list of Code Samples related to Free Utilities for your PowerBuilder apps. These code examples are found at Appeon's CodeXChange.

This tutorial has discussed how to interface traditional, Windows-hosted PowerBuilder 32-bit and 64-bit applications with the Windows Application Programming Interface (API), also known as the WinAPI. In the first three parts, the groundwork was laid to make you more knowledgeable and comfortable coding External Function Declarations (EFD's) and understanding the nuances of how information is exchanged between PB and Windows API functions. Part four contains a list of coding tips and techniques and mapping tables to help you with the translation between many common WinAPI datatypes and the standard PB datatypes. It also describes a free PB sample application and non-visual user object that can dynamically determine the memory size and layout of a structure in either 32-bit or 64-bit environments.

* * * Part four content has been revised and expanded from the original version * * *