The BAPBUG Journal
Issue #4, November 1998

Welcome from our President
By Debbie Arczynski

Meeting Information

BAPBUG Web Page

Window tricks

Important Sybase News

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Contact List

Welcome from our President

Welcome to the Baltimore Area PBUG newsletter.

We have some exciting news! Corporate Technology Partners, a company which offers a full line of client/server and web application development and training services, has sponsored our user group by subscribing, in behalf of all our members, to PowerTimes, an international journal for Client/Server and Intranet/Internet development, focusing on PowerBuilder, Power ++, and PowerJ. However, you must become registered in order to start receiving PowerTimes. You can register on our web site at: www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/bay/8680 and select Meeting Information.

This newsletter is YOUR newsletter! We hope that it is stimulating and helps you in your quest for the answer to the ultimate PowerBuilder question that you have on your mind! By the way, what is your question? You can forward all questions to any of the technical advisors. They are there for you. Their phone numbers and email addresses are listed in the newsletter, along with all of the BAPBUG officers.

Please feel free to contact any of the officers if you have suggestions of topics for our bi-monthly meetings, concerns with the running/editing of the meetings or newsletter, or just comments in general.

We also want to encourage you to submit small, medium, or large articles of interest to the PowerBuilder community along with any "PowerBuilder tips" that have helped you along your way and may help others.

We want to thank Greg Dzingeleski for volunteering to take on the enormous task of organizing and putting together this newsletter. Thanks Greg!

We hope to see you at our next meeting in December, and hope to hear from you soon!

Debbie Arczynski

Many thanks to Anne Sola for presenting "PowerBuilder and the Year 2000", and to Fred Grau for stepping in at the last minute and presenting "Rearchitecting a ‘Legacy’ PowerBuilder Application to Use the PFC". Anne is the Web Administrator for BAPBUG, and Fred is the treasurer. We want to thank them for their time and effort.

Our next meeting is Wednesday, December 2 at the OAG building at SSA from 3 to 6 PM. It will consist of a presentation by Ed Kennedy from Sybase, Inc. Ed will be presenting "Building Good Components". During this presentation, Ed will describe how to architect your PowerBuilder applications for 3-tier computing. It is basically a 12 step program to developing true Client-Server applications. Hope you can make it.

Mark Pfeifer with Corporate Technology Partners, will be at the February meeting to present "Web Enabling PowerBuilder Applications" and "Building Enterprise Solutions with the Sybase Tools." These presentations will focus on the Sybase tools and their use in developing Enterprise Solutions. Mark will also demonstrate the PowerBuilder Web Deployment kit which was announced at the 1998 Powersoft User Conference in Los Angeles. The kit is a promising technology that allows any PowerBuilder application to be deployed unmodified to a browser from any standard Windows NT 4.0 server. It'll deliver PowerBuilder applications over the Internet to any computing device that contains the Java Virtual Machine. Existing PowerBuilder application won't have to be rewritten. This sounds like an exciting presentation. Hope to see you there.

If you are interested in speaking on a particular subject, or would like to demo your PowerBuilder application that you have been working on, please contact Debbie Arczynski at (410) 796-9461 (or softquip@home.com). There are openings for presentations or demos of any length from 10 minutes to 2 hours. Thanks!

Please take a look at our new web page designed by Anne Sola. It has lots of information about the group itself, the officers, the agenda, events, jobs, and links to other PB web pages. It is located at: www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/bay/8680. If you have any suggestions and/or comments, please contact Anne Sola.

It is here that you can register for PowerTimes, an international journal for Client/Server and Intranet/Internet development, focusing on PowerBuilder, Power ++, and PowerJ. You simply select Meeting Information and you can register for PowerTimes, courtesy of Corporate Technology Partners, a company which offers a full line of client/server and web application development and training services.

While looking in the object browser I noticed an object I had never bothered with before, the mdiclient object. This object is inherited from windowobject. The mdiclient object is the client area of a frame window. Powerbuilder automagically creates an mdiclient object when it opens a frame window and names it mdi_1. You can reference this variable in powerscript with a line like frame.mdi_1.height = #. The object doesn't have many properties and only one function (setredraw). The properties are bringtotop (boolean), height, microhelpheight, width, x, y (all integers) and backcolor (long). One practical use of this would be to change the client area of a frame to leave room for a task bar or status bar in the frame. This would save you the trouble of having to resize your windows to accommodate for the loss of client area.

Sybase Inc. on Tuesday named John Chen CEO and chairman of the board, replacing Mitchell Kertzman, who is reportedly going to Network Computing Inc., a company jointly owned by Oracle Inc.'s and Netscape Communications Corp. Chen will be responsible for day-to-day operations, corporate strategy and execution, as well as products and services. Kertzman is leaving Sybase just as the company has returned from the dead. In its latest quarter, Sybase reported a profit of 3 cents a share, but revenue sagged. Chen's challenge will be to bolster sales, which have declined six of the past seven quarters as the company takes its lumps from Oracle.

Although Oracle hasn't made an official announcement about Kertzman, the Wall Street Journal reported that the former Sybase CEO is going to Network Computer. Kertzman has been no fan of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison so his new position seems odd on the surface. The Wall Street Journal, however, reported that Oracle is seeking new investors to reduce its influence over the company. Network Computing was created to focus on Ellison's vision of distributed computing, an idea that flopped after PC prices fell. The unit then focused on Microsoft's WebTV without much success. Network Computing has found a niche working with cable companies for set-top boxes that will feature Internet access. In that market, Network Computing is likely to run into Microsoft again and possibly General Instrument Corp. (NYSE: GIC, financials), which dominates the set-top box market. Network Computing could also compete with Spyglass Inc. (Nasdaq: SPYG) on the software side.

Someone approached an officer regarding working on the newsletter or helping out with BAPBUG in some other way. I've been unable to reach you through the email address you have. If you or anyone else for that matter would like to help out BAPBUG please contact one of the officers. We really are interested!

We could also use any articles, no matter how long for the newsletter. We would like this newsletter to help members communicate and to give people a way to participate without having to put together a presentation. So if you have anything to contribute please send it to greg.dzingeleski@ssa.gov or any one of the officers listed at the end of the newsletter.

Contacts

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