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Resolved Appeon PB Questions From My Company

  1. Misc
1
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  1. Olan Knight
    Olan Knight
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 17:39 PM UTC

Dear Armeen -

   It appears as if I have managed to convince my company to at least LOOK at the new version of PowerBuilder. It took long enugh, but I finally found someone in upper management who was receptive. In that vein, the company has the following questions:

1. Is it possible to add to our current PBv12.1 b7055 license count?
    What would the cost be per license?

2. Are there pricing discounts available for multiple licenses of Appeon PB?
   For example, 1 PB Standard license  is $895 per year. What would 4 licenses cost? How about 8 licenses?
   What about for the PB Cloud licenses?

3. Is there an official Appeon PowerBuilder physical class available? An interactive online class? I do know that online tutorials are available.
   What is the cost? What is the schedule?

4. Does Appeon have/support/include/recommend a testing tool for use with PowerBuilder, specifically for use as a Regression test tool?
   What would this cost?

5. Does Appeon have/support/include/recommend a Source Control product?
   Note that we have ONE PowerBuilder developer in our shop, along with one manager and one tester.
   WizSource is the preferred product based on my personal research, and I'd like to have it officially verified that it works with PB2019.


Thank You,

Olan Knight

OLE Object -> Insert Object dialog inclusion
SetTextStyle doesn't work properly in a RTE-window...
Accepted Answer
Armeen Mazda @Appeon
Armeen Mazda @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 18:45 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # Permalink

Hi Olan,

1. Regarding increasing license count, yes you can do that but you need to upgrade your project at least to PowerBuilder 2017 R3.  The reason is PowerBuilder 12.x and older is already EOL.  The good news is upgrading from PowerBuilder 12.x to 2017 R3 or newer is very easy.

2. The standard policy is to provide a 10% discount for 10 licenses or more (under the same order).  Please contact our sales department by emailing sales@appeon.com to get a quote.  The Professional Edition is good for maintaining existing client/server projects and creating new C# projects. The CloudPro Edition is good for deploying existing client/server projects to the cloud and/or migrating existing projects to C#.

3. Regarding training resources, Appeon-U is great free resource for somebody that doesn't know PowerBuilder at all.  I would add to Michael Kramer's response that there are paid training also available from some of our other consulting partners, and of course PowerPeople in Germany is also one of our good consulting partners too and Michael is one of our MVPs.

4. Regarding testing tools and frameworks, your options depend on what kind of project you are doing with PowerBuilder.

For PowerScript projects, no testing tools or frameworks are provided.  There are some open-source unit testing frameworks, such as PBUnit or possibly this new one: https://community.appeon.com/index.php/qna/q-a/pb-unit-test-framework-interest  As far as visual testing tools, the two that we are aware works very well with PowerBuilder are AscentialTest and Silk Test.  You would need to contact the respective third-party vendors to get price quotes and support. 

For C# projects, we have integrated the xUnit open-source unit testing framework and provide a Web API tester tool that is similar to Postman but in some ways actually better.  With that said, since the C# projects comply with open standards so you can use any unit testing framework, such as NUnit.  There are too many testing tools for C# that are free or paid to list.

5. Regarding recommended source control, PowerBuilder 2017 and onwards has native interface to Git and SVN, which are the only two source controls that we test.  That is not to say WizSource is not a good solution, but it would be up to the third-party vendor to ensure compatibility.  So I cannot make any comment about WizSource.

Best regards,
Armeen

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Olan Knight
  1. Olan Knight
  2. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 20:39 PM UTC
Thank you, Armeen!



Olan
  1. Helpful
Armeen Mazda @Appeon
  1. Armeen Mazda @Appeon
  2. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 20:52 PM UTC
You're very welcome!
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Responses (3)
Miguel Leeuwe
Miguel Leeuwe Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Thursday, 13 February 2020 03:54 AM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 1

Hi Dan,

FWIW:

  • I don't think you'll need any schooling to be able to "get going" with 2017 or 2019 to migrate your current 12.1 applications. 2017 and 2019 are basically the same as 12.6 with extra features. So your main difference is going to be between 12.1 and 12.6 versions. One difference you'll find is with MAPI (take my advice and set

[PB]
UseSimpleMAPI=No

in the pb.ini file) You have to flush the outbox using OLE, depending on Outlook caching settings. Therefore we now only use MAPI to popup an address list and the rest for email, we do it with OLE (for now).

and I also found out that in multiline edits, the "ending return" counts as 1 position on Windows 10, instead as 2 positions like it did before). Not sure if that would also happen on pb 12.1, but it does also happen with 12.6.

Of course there's lots of new stuff that you might want to use in the future, so for that any course would be great, yes.

  • WizSource (with FireBird) seems to work great for us on 2017, but we haven't used it for much more than a month now. Right now, we stay far away from Git and SVN as we see faaaar too many bugs being reported by people and we just don't see the need to have to merge our changes by someone due to the absence of locking (yes, I know there are some solutions that do lock, but that seems like an invitation to even more bugs, sorry to be pessimistic on this). I'm convinced though that within a year or so, those bugs might all have been fixed by Appeon.

HIH

Comment
Olan Knight
  1. Olan Knight
  2. Thursday, 13 February 2020 14:23 PM UTC
Those are wonderful tips! Thank you vbery much for them. Miguel!

Olan

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Michael Kramer
Michael Kramer Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 18:10 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 2

Great work, Olan!

On training I can reply:

1) Introductory training available online for free via Appeon-U.

2) For classroom training there may be alternatives I don't know of. In Europe you will find Power-People in Berlin, Germany offers paid in-person classes.

NOTE: Full disclosure: I'm involved in that service - which is why I know it exists.
Also, you will see from the "schedule" online that there has been very little request for in-person training in Europe for several years.

Re: Support for PB 2019 in WizSource => You can probably receive specific confirmation from TopWiz Programming whereas Appeon probably focuses on PowerBuilder source control interfaces in general (SCC, native git, and native SVN).

HTH /Michael

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Michael Kramer
  1. Michael Kramer
  2. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 18:44 PM UTC
Certainly, Olan. And I agree you need official reply from Armeen.

In my view you get most bang for the buck if you combine online training at your own speed with access to instructor competence as you need. No reason to throw more money at instructor than is needed.

You can always reach me via LinkedIn for further discussions. Alternative reach out to Power People. You can find the company on Appeon's consulting partner web page (https://www.appeon.com/consultants/consulting-partners).
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Chris Pollach @Appeon
  1. Chris Pollach @Appeon
  2. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 19:30 PM UTC
As a past certified PowerSoft and Sybase CSI instructor .. please feel free to continue to throw money.

Just kidding - LOL!
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Olan Knight
  1. Olan Knight
  2. Wednesday, 12 February 2020 20:45 PM UTC
Thanks to both of you! :)



Olan
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