First of all, it's worth mentioning that the choice of network hardware and software used in a company depends on the network topology. But the topology, in turn, depends on the company's needs and requirements. Thus, the competent network topology increases the efficiency of all the o...

This book is unique in the library of SharePoint 2010 books I own. It is a recipe book for entire solutions. The recipes take you from compiling the requirements to the implementation and the management of the final solution. Although the solutions in the book are good, they are not w...

I talk to a lot of CIOs. I met with one recently who oversees the IT operation of a $6 Billion yearly entertainment-related company with about 7,000 employees. This top-notch exec was all about transforming a huge investment in existing IT infrastructure into a new dynamic, extensible...

I occasionally get questions from clients who are using Agile and Scrum frameworks for software development. Techniques and tools aside, it is often questions about the fundamentals of collaboration that seem to be getting in the team’s way. Unlike most of the rest of the universe, ...

The application release lifecycle is unnecessarily complex, manual and time-consuming and its cumbersome nature is putting businesses in a position of weakness. This one very critical process determines how fast a business can deliver products to market and yet is complex, error-prone ...

First, let’s make it clear what an endpoint is. In Microsoft’s world this term represents any client computer, server, or laptop in an organization. Forefront Endpoint Protection is a line-of-business application developed by Microsoft to provide defense against viruses, worms, and oth...

The most enjoyable part of my job at AppDynamics is to witness and evangelize customer success. What’s slightly strange is that for this to happen, an application has to slow down or crash. It’s a bittersweet feeling when End Users, Operations, Developers and many Businesse...

In my previous article for PowerBuilder Developer’s Journal (Vol. 18 issue 8), I gave a sneak preview of some of the things we were working on for PB15 Classic. This is a closer look at one of them – Tabs and Docking in MDI Windows. Recall that in the article we mentioned adding two n...

Design patterns are one of the most successful advances in software engineering, by any measure. The history of design patterns is a strange one though, and somewhere along the way, much of their original utility and elegance has been forgotten, misplaced, or simply miscommunicated. Th...

PaaS is nothing but uploading your small kernel of code with business logic and the PaaS service provider will run that code on allocated computing and storage instances. The aim of PaaS is to let the developers concentrate on developing their code rather than creating and maintaining ...

In this article we will list some steps you can take to make sure your Exchange Server is running as securely as possible. 1. Harden the OS We can’t stress enough how important it is to harden the OS that is hosting the Exchange Server.

In his book The Art of Action (2011), Stephen Bungay identifies three gaps that frustrate the ability of organizations to translate plans into actions that lead to desired outcomes. He calls them the knowledge, alignment and effects gaps. Here, I wish to reflect on Bungay’s perspective...

Enterprise monitoring gets a great deal more air time these days than it ever did in the past. Perhaps it's because our technology dependent lives have become some so reliant on the availability of systems and infrastructural services. Have things improved? How would you know? In real...

When we aren’t fighting crime, taking over the world, or enjoying a good book by the fire, we here on the eEye Research team like to participate in the Any Means Possible (AMP) Penetration Testing engagements with our clients. For us, it’s a great way to interact one-on-one with IT fol...

I was sitting in a meeting sometime ago with a company that was embracing Scrum like a ten year old being offered a warm plate of chocolate chip cookies. They were grabbing at it as fast as they're little hands could reach out and grab the goodies. Watching this made me wonder what is...

Your reaction to the title is probably one of the following: Why should it be a challenge? Co-existence would be impossible. There will be difficulties but it can be done. Why should this be a challenge? After all, EA is agnostic to software development methodologies. After all, EA is ...

One of the innovative new features in the PowerBuilder 12.5.1 release is its ability to deploy PowerBuilder .NET code to run in 64-bit mode on 64-bit Windows platforms. In this article, after gaining background and perspective on 32- and 64-bit memory management and .NET deployment mod...

PowerBuilder 12.5 introduced a number of significant enhancements to web services support, both for creation and consumption. We’re going to look at what those new features provide and how to use them. We’re also going to look at how we can package some of that functionality so that ...

Is MapReduce the Holy Grail answer to the pressing problem of processing, analyzing and making sense of large and growing data volumes? Certainly it has potential in this arena, but there is a distressing gap between the amount of hype this technology – and its spinoffs – has received ...

Part 2 of "RESTful Web Services: A Quick-Start How-To Guide" explores foundational issues in coding RESTful operations, including Basic Authentication and Exception handling. Along the way I’ll share with you multiple real-world coding tips and workarounds. As a teenager, one of my fa...

Finding the perfect balance of influence between IT and the Business Owners (I will resist the urge to refer to them as B.O.) is not easy. I usually find that most projects are influenced by one or the other in an unbalanced manner. The story is usually goes like this... The business...

Among PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET’s new features comes the ability to use WCF to call RESTful web services. This article, the first in a two-part series, provides a PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET developer with the foundational knowledge and skills to rapidly get up and running building PowerBuilde...

I’ve been programming since around 1982, first using an Apple in high school and then finally getting my first computer, the Timex Sinclair 1000 (2k of ROM and 2k of RAM), that same year. Both computers came with a form of the BASIC programming language and it was the start of my lifel...

This is the second part of a two-part article. In the last article we learned how to use the tag property to create our own microhelp and automate it. In this article we are going to go one step further and use the tag property for other things. The list of items that I used the tag p...

An enterprise without a modernization strategy is an enterprise with a painful future of paying technical debt with the highest interest possible. This is especially true of custom-developed applications. Software changes, period. So why not include a strategy for change in your enter...

Part 1 of the Windows Azure Series, provided an introduction to Windows Azure, and Part 2 provided a look inside the Windows Azure datacenters. Part 3 will continue with a look at the Windows Azure Roles and the Development Environment. The last one is especially important for the next...

If you’re familiar with the Database Binary / Text Large Object column type in PowerBuilder Classic (see Figure 1), you know it’s a way of storing blob data associated with an OLE Automation application (Paint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel) and then displaying it as part of a DataWi...

There are all kinds of pies, chicken pot pie, shepherd’s pie, cherry pie and of course good ol’ American apple pie. Every host or hostess knows that pies are perfect circles. There are infinite ways to divide and serve them. They can be cut in halves, thirds, quarters, eighths, sixteen...

Increasingly, IT managers, CIOs and software developers are turning to a new approach for rapidly building robust database applications without programming - application generators. Today’s business environment demands managers find ways to do more with less, and application generation...

One of the main goals of PowerBuilder Classic application refactoring is to divide the code into logical partitions. Although you will likely not gain significant performance increases in exchange for your efforts, you will achieve two other highly significant gains. First, your logic ...

The most agile project teams I have seen are those that do not claim to be agile or lean. They have a solid well documented architecture in place as well as designs of the modules being built. They have separated the responsibilities amongst the team members according to the team membe...

Part of the allure of the .NET platform is that all code, no matter what language or grammar it’s written in, compiles down to Common Intermediate Language (CIL) that is managed and executed by the Common Language Runtime (CLR). PowerScript code goes through a two-step process before b...

XAML data binding is a codeless (declarative) way of transferring information from one object to another. It’s very helpful in a UI where data originating in one object controls a characteristic of (or is the source of data displayed in) another object. Data binding’s main benefit is t...

A great agile team is a highly disciplined team. Embracing new levels of discipline consistently across teams is tough without guidance and continual feedback. Wouldn’t it be great to have an experienced Agile Development Coach entrenched into every single one of your project teams? Th...

When Sybase originally released PowerBuilder 10.0, one of the new features they added with that version was the PowerDesigner plug-in. There had been a number of IDE “add-in” third-party products for PowerBuilder before (e.g, SmartPaste, SmartJump), but this was the first time that Syb...

While there is literature describing how to use .NET controls in PB (see for example, past issues of this magazine), all are silent on how to set control properties at runtime and how to persist them. This article will address both issues. Like regular OLE controls, you can allow you...

Clips or snippets are pieces of code that are either difficult to remember or often used with minor tweaks. Developers look for ways to leverage their IDE to write code snippets once and then paste them into an editor whenever / wherever they are needed. In Classic the IDE facility is ...

Back in my younger days, I could run a sub seven-minute mile. When I heard about somebody running a five-minute mile, I thought “now that’s really fast.” Today, the world record for the mile run is 3:43:13, set in 1999 by Hicham El Guerrouj from Morocco. In the ’80s, IT projects f...

A cloud service in Windows Azure will typically have multiple concurrent instances. Each instance may be running all or a part of the service’s codebase. As a developer, you control the number and type of roles that you want running your service. Windows Azure roles are comparable to...

As software developers, our mission is to deliver positive, technology-based solutions – software that provides both the means and the method for working faster, performing better, achieving more. There is little doubt that the technologies we create provide users with the control and ...