Hi Bob,

As Chris mentioned, the PowerBuilder IDE itself is not officially supported on Windows Server OS, but of course your compiled apps can be run that way (e.g. Citrix, Terminal Services, etc.).  So we recommend using the standalone PB compiler, which as an added benefit won't use up 1 of your PB licenses.

With that said, the issues you mentioned with the license mechanism (e.g. remembering the login, etc.) has been greatly enhanced in PowerBuilder 2019 R3. 

You can now start and log into PowerBuilder IDE by specifying your user account and password in the command line parameters. The command line mode can only work with the online license.

You can directly specify your user account through the command line parameter. For example,

pb190.exe /AC test@appeon.com /PW xxxxxxx /RC N /ALS N /SOE Y
/AC -- User Account. This parameter is required to be set.

/PW -- User Password. This parameter is required to be set.

/RC -- Remember Credentials (Y or N), default is Y. /RC is always Y when /ALS is Y. Therefore, the /RC value will be ignored, if /ALS is set to Y.

/ALS -- Auto Login at Startup (Y or N), default is Y.

/SOE -- Sign Out on Exit (Y or N), default is Y.

You can also specify a file (that contains your user credentials) through the command line parameter. For example,

pb190.exe /LIF c:\test.ini
/LIF -- The full path to the license login initialization file which contains your encrypted password and other login settings. The file is created by an independent tool (%Appeon%\PowerBuilder [version]\Tools\LoginIniFileCreator.exe). You can specify the user account, the password, the login settings, and the file path in this tool. The password will be encrypted in the generated file to protect your login credentials. (If you want to copy the tool to other places, make sure to copy the executable file as well as the msvcp100.dll and msvcr100.dll files under the same folder).

So if you upgrade then I think this issue you mentioned should be resolved.  PB 2019 R3 is currently in beta, and the final release is scheduled for early December 2020.

Best regards,
Armeen

Hi Kevin;

   The answer is NO and even foremost, the PB IDE is not even certified to be installed on any MS-Windows "Server" editions. FYI: http://docs.appeon.com/pb2019r2/installation_guide_for_pb/ch01s01.html

This has been the case throughout all the PB versions over time (thus far) .  

   What you should be using on a "Server" version of MS-Windows for compilation is the new Appeon PB external compiler (the PBC). FYI: http://community.appeon.com/index.php/qna/q-a?controller=attachment&task=download&tmpl=component&id=465

HTH

Regards ... Chris