Ice Tea Group

PPJ Framework goes Reporting Viewer/Reporting Services

Thomas Althammer — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:09:00 GMT

One of the best kept secrets of the PPJ Framework was support for the Report Viewer object, a standalone control for reporting purposes that is in some ways compatible with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

We built the conversion target and accompanying runtime support a couple of years ago for an interesting project in the UK. Since then interest was limited and most customers decided for Crystal Reports or Stimulsoft Reports.Net as their preferred migration target.

Just recently the ReportViewer implementation has started to bring in new clients. By looking at the projects and the decision making process we found three reasons for this:

ReportViewer is a free and somewhat standardized component that ships with Visual Studio. It is not part of the .NET framework but can be distributed royalty-free if you have your licensed copy of VS. This means no third-party components, no incompatabilities, hassle-free deployment. There is even a free stand-alone editor with an implementation of the XML-based RDL (report definition language).
While the first versions of this component had their limits, Microsoft did a good job in improving functionality and adding missing features. Today the ReportViewer and its big brother Reporting Services have evolved to a powerful duo that can compete with industry-leading solutions such as Crystal Reports. The PPJ Framework now supports the latest version that came with Visual Studio 2012.
Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is just one step away. Once ported it is very easy to refactor a previously client-side embedded report into a server-based reporting landscape with automated report delivery, powerful performance improvements, and dashboard-like integrations.

Just again, porting can open doors and unlock the true value and potential of man-years of development. Using Ice Porter and the PPJ Framework is not a one-way path. We actually help bringing existing applications to the great new world of todays products and technologies, fully relying on world-proven systems and components.

News from Microsoft and their impact on our tools & services

Frank Boettcher — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 03:56:00 GMT

2012 brought us quite a lot of new and interesting stuff from Microsoft. Here is a quick update on the new toolsets and frameworks and our current activities to integrate these.

.NET 4.5
The latest release of the .NET framework is a replacement for version 4.0 i.e. it is supposed to be 100% backward compatible to it's predecessor. .NET 4.5 introduces new major versions of its underlying languages: C# 5 and Visual Basic 11.

The most important new feature for both languages is their support for asynchronous programming implemented by a new concept based on two keywords: async and await. You can find a detailed review here: http://www.devproconnections.com/article/visual-studio-2011/net-framework-4-5-143247

Some other additions are also worth checking out:

A nice feature has been added to trackdown bugs and issues: There is now a way to retrieve the name and line number of a calling method. That is pretty useful for custom logging and will certainly help during development and support.
The common language runtime (CLR) has also been improved. The Portable Class Library simplifies the cross platform development supporting i.e. Windows Phone or Windows 8 apps.
Garbage Control is now faster and less blocking - we found this to be a pretty good mechanism already. Microsoft put even more effort into making this better.

While we currently still link our PPJ framework to .NET 4.0, developers are now open to decide to link to 4.5 and make use of the new features that have been introduced.

Visual Studio 2012

Not only the framework has its new release, also the IDE comes in a new version. So what's new in our favorite IDE?

While you could already float individual files in VS 2010 you can now float & pin complete tab sets. All in all a new set of options especially when using multiple monitors.

For those who are not yet familiar with the rich set of commands and functions inside the IDE, Microsoft has created "Quick launch" (short cut Ctrl+Q). That way you can easily locate any function or option that could otherwise remain hidden deep inside some unknown menu hierarchies.
A cool new feature added in VS 2012 is the code-clone detection where you can scan your code for possible clones and optimize it by reducing redundancy.
For those who are working on web applications inside VS 2012 there is now a DOM Explorer that not only lists styles, layouts and attributes but also offers to change them immediately. This is a nice add-on to quickly test changes without the need for restarting your application.
IntelliSense has also been further improved especially for Java Script, jQuery and HTML 5. It now includes information gathered from XML documentation comments. The JavaScript console from Internet Explorer (hit F12 for details) has been taken over to Visual Studio, too.
Visual Studio 2012 ships with two color themes (dark & light) but you can also create your own color theme by using the freely available theme editor (that also includes some more prebuild themes).
File previewing is now much smoother in VS 2012 as well as a member listing in the Solution Explorer.

Our major conversion tool "Ice Porter" will soon be extended to also support the
generation of Visual Studio 2012 projects & solutions so that you can directly benefit from all the new features.

Graphics with Xara

Joe Meyer — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 01:49:00 GMT

Usually I don't have to do graphical design so I'm not familiar with the common design applications like Photoshop, Gimp and the like. But every once in a while I do have the need to draw something that looks cool and makes a professional impression. Learning Photoshop just for these rare occasions isn't worth the effort, at least not for me.

Browsing for graphical design tools I happened to find Xara Designer Pro (see http://www.xara.com/us/products/designer). The price seemed fair enough for me so I bought it. Comments of other users and tutorial videos on Youtube stated that it was pretty easy to learn but still very powerful.

I have to say that I am very happy with the product. It is incredibly fast and is indeed easy to learn. It has all the standard graphic features you need and you can do almost everything with it. Definitely worth to have a look.

Here are a few helpful links:
http://www.xaraxone.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/XaraXhris
or simply search Youtube for "xara designer"

Do you speak Fantom, Gambas or Groovy?

Frank Boettcher — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:19:00 GMT

UNESCO currently lists 2473 languages in their world atlas to be "in danger":
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/index.php?hl=en&page=atlasmap

While there is no real equivalent view in terms of programming languages,
you can still derive your own conclusion from the different popularity indexes
that are usually published at the beginning of a new year.

One is called the "PopularitY of Programming Language" index - simply PYPL. It is based on Google Trends and measures how often programming language manuals are being searched for at Google. It lists C# as the biggest winner in 2012 naming it "language of the year" showing an increase of 1.8% to a total share of 10.1% in 2012:
https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language

Well, if you don´t believe that much in swarm intelligence or what the makers
of PYPL call it "collective wisdom", there is another well known index:
TIOBE tries to determine the number of skilled developers using each language based on searches on different platforms like Wikipedia, Amazon, Youtube and others.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

While you find some different results here, you still recognize a lot of well known programming languages. The list goes down to position 50 with a measured share of 0.158%. And then there is an enumeration of another 50 programming languages with rather exotic names like "Fantom", "Gambas" or "Groovy" that probably most software developers never ever heard of before.

Are they "in Danger"? We don´t know. But what we know for sure is that it makes sense to stick with at least the top 100 of listed languages for business applications to act strategically and make sure a community is still around in a few years.

Team Foundation Service from Microsoft

Carsten Nielsen — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 04:42:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Microsoft released Team Foundation Service, which is Team Foundation Server moved to the cloud. This gives development teams a chance to store their source code and work items in the cloud, making server configuration a thing of the past. Small teams with up to five people go for free. Check out the headlines at https://tfs.visualstudio.com/ to get a jump start.

This new offer is working pretty well “right out of the box”. A few clicks on the web and a few steps in Visual Studio and you are up and running. Team projects in the cloud have the form of xxx.visualstudio.com as shown in the following example:

Team Foundation Services are rather easy to set up:

Make sure you are using TFS as the source control plugin in Visual Studio (see the menu item Tools/Options/Source Control).
Now you are ready to connect to TFS in the cloud. Point to Team/Connect to Team Foundation Server/Servers/Add... and provide the link to the online presence you created.
Make sure to set up your local mapping as a link between the TFS environment and your local drive as a working folder.

Please mind the prerequisites for Visual Studio 2010: Install Service Pack 1 and take a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2662296.

What’s your name today?

Joe Meyer — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:22:00 GMT

A company’s name is an important thing. It’s not just a name, it’s a brand. It stands for something. Apple, for example, is not just a name, it stands for innovative ground breaking products. Would they change their name? If they did, what would you think would happen?

So what’s the name of the Team Developer manufacturer? They started with the name Gupta which became a brand soon, well known for a good 4GL development tool. Then they changed the name to Centura but they didn’t just change the name, they also lost the reputation that was associated with the name. They lost the brand.

And it got worse. They changed the name again and then they got sold and renamed and then they got sold again and renamed. I can’t even remember all the names they used. I’m not even sure which name they use right now. Changing name is a bad decision or, if you will, a bad management mistake.

In my opinion it’s a good idea to stick with a company name. Especially when it has a good reputation and has become a brand. Apple is actually a pretty odd name for an IT company (and Ice Tea Group, too). But it’s well known and it’s a brand so it’s a good idea to keep it.

Resource Problems

Joe Meyer — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:18:00 GMT

Finding resources can become a problem. And I’m not talking about finding the right image for a toolbar button. I’m talking about finding developers.

The IT industry is a fast moving market and today’s modern technology is old fashioned tomorrow. This is especially true for development environments. And if you are a developer you’ll want to work with the state-of-the-art tools. Travelling to overseas on a steam boat may be fun but everybody takes the plane. Everybody wants to be involved in web and mobile nowadays. Even if Team Developer pretends to be .NET, who cares? .NET is not hip anymore, it's a standard. We have already moved on to migrating Gupta applications to HTML5 Rich Internet Applications, based on .NET of course.

As a consequence the number of Team Developer programmers available for hire is basically zero. Every Team Developer programmer that quits (or retires) leaves a gap you can’t fill. While we are talking to customers the argument comes up every time: we can’t find developers. So stop complaining, drop your old stuff and move on. We are here to help.

Back to the Future - Once Again

Gianluca Pivato — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:44:00 GMT

Gupta Technologies is now, again, Gupta Technologies.

After changing to Centura, then Gupta, then Halo, then Unify we are now back at the beginning. It is said that before going to heaven, old people become like kids again, at least in their minds. Is Unify/Gupta getting closer to heaven? We don’t know.

This is what we know: Unify has changed its business from development tools to corporate software when they changed to Daegis in July 2011. Since the acquisition, their shares value dropped a whopping -73.77% down to 0.94 cents (from $3.58 in February 2011) and it’s now a “penny stock”. The company lost $15.7 million dollars in the last quarter and saw their revenue decrease by $3.0 million dollars compared to the same quarter the previous year.

Finally, on August 1^st 2012 and right before they changed the tools business name from Unify to Gupta, the Nasdaq Stock Market sent them a “Notice of Delisting.”

Given the steep drop in shareholder value and market value (the market cap is now $13.85M) and the current total debt of $21.25M maybe the new Gupta Technologies is up for sale, again?

New Office2010 skins available!

Frank Boettcher — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:58:00 GMT

New skins for your applications are available in our download section.

They allow you to adopt the look & feel that was introduced with Office 2010.

See some screenshots that demonstrates just a few controls:

Office 2010 Blue

Office 2010 Silver

Please feel free to download the skins and make direct use of an updated user appearance for your applications.

Lab news: PPJ Framework 2012 progress update

Thomas Althammer — Tue, 01 May 2012 05:17:00 GMT

Lets put some details around recent rumors: It is true - we are finalizing the work on PPJ Framework 2012 with some great new features and improvements!
While we have ported just again a number of fascinating projects around the world as always with the "no single failure + all happy customers" guarantee, our engineers have been busy throughout recent months.

We will deliver updated and state-of-the-art components from our long-term partner ComponentOne that has contributed the FlexGrid and the RibbonBar to our framework. An updated version of the well-received Skinning Engine will also be available including all rights to deploy these high-quality components to your customers.
Plus we are adding great UI stuff: we'll have a navigation bar control with a nice SAL interface for easy integration in existing projects and we'll support HTML rendering for labels and radio buttons.

Coming with PPJ Framework 2012 there is a new watermark option you can set for all your editable controls, including table cells and editable combo boxes. This watermark text shows up in many controls in todays applications to explain what to enter or to show a default text.

Stay tuned for updates on our progress. In our diaries we have pinned down a planned release date in just a few weeks. We'll then proudly present the next version of our world-proven framework technology that comes just as reliable and fast as in every previous version. It will be fully backwards compatible for all ported projects since day one. You shouldn't accept anything else.

Running Visual Studio in elevated mode

Thomas Althammer — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:00:00 GMT

Many tasks in Visual Studio can be accomplished using standard security settings. To open a solution with Visual Studio 2010 SP1, just double-click the .sln solution file. There are a number of situations where you may want VS to run as an administrator, for example when your .NET objects are being registered as COM components. ActiveX registrations only work in elevated mode.

There is an easy solution for running VS always as an administrator, I thought. Just change the file properties and off you go. Well... to keep it short and ignore a couple of hours I spent on this - it didn't work and the solution to this turns out to be much more complicated.

The reason for this is the Visual Studio version selector, a little tool that is run each time you try to open a .sln file. It inspects the .sln file to find out which version of Visual Studio is to be started if you have several versions installed in parallel on your machine.

Fabian from www.re-motion.org wrote a good blog article about this and explains how to fix this problem. I'd like to share this with you as I am sure it will be of help:

https://www.re-motion.org/blogs/mix/2011/05/03/getting-visual-studio-2010-sp1-to-run-elevated-when-launching/

Forget the Outline - Introducing Code Visualization

Thomas Althammer — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:26:00 GMT

One thing I am missing in many development environments is good code navigation. Most IDEs have a class browser and combo boxes to help you find item instances and member implementations. But I am often missing the big picture of the file or section I am working on. I am looking for a convenient yet compact overall code overview.

SQLWindows has the Outline which represents a hierarchical structure of a project. I looked around and found a cool alternative for Visual Studio a while ago, called Source Outliner (see The Outline is Back). That's pretty cool and darn helpful to get around.

But my programming life has become even better, thanks to Michael Kiss from AxTools. He is the author of VS10x Code Map, a Visual Studio 2010 extension that displays a graphical nested representation of the current code editor window. See this:

Isn't that cool? Nested types are put into expandable sections and marked by different colors. You can see distinctive icons with overlays and simply click around while the left view is synced with the code editor window.

The speed is amazing and it provides a fantastic overview. It is very easy to understand complex code structures and navigating around becomes real fun. Plus, there are more goodies inside: favorite items can be highlighted, a persistant history is provided and you can quickly access code parts by named bookmarks or filtering.

It is simply amazing how much you can do in the .NET world, by just adding another tool from CodePlex. Check it out: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1c54d1bd-d898-4705-903f-fa4a319b50f2

Announcing Support for Stimulsoft Reports.Net

Thomas Althammer — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:11:00 GMT

Picking the right reporting engine is at least as difficult as finding the right programming language for a project. We have converted thousands of Gupta/Centura and Unify Report Builder reports to SAP's Crystal Reports, combit's List & Label, as well as Microsoft's Reporting Services already, so why yet another reporting platform?

Each of the products has it strengths and, to be honest with you, I was quite sceptical in the beginning when I first heard about Stimulsoft. A company located in Russia and Belarus that I had never come across before. I thought life was easy "just" having to know Crystal Reports, List & Labels, and Reporting Services plus few more Java options. Nevertheless, I gave it a try and downloaded the demo version.

The product is really powerful and it is a very mature reporting environment combining many good concepts into one product. It is much more powerful than Crystal Reports and comes with a royalty-free integrated designer, it is more inexpensive than List & Label and is by far more flexible, and compared to Reporting Services it is more complete and flexible.

But the most important part, it is platform independent in a entirely new context. The following technologies and platforms are available and supported by the product:

	Designer	Viewer
WinForms	x	x
Silverlight	x	x
WPF	x	x
Web (AJAX)		x
Adobe Flash/Flex/PHP	x	x

This fits perfectly with our new product offerings for the Web and Cloud-based deployments. Skeptical? Try out the online demos: http://www.stimulsoft.com/Products.aspx

We have successfully converted several thousand reports in a large Swiss project to Stimulsoft and the quality is simply outstanding. Our porting technology for Stimulsoft is currently being finalized and will be released soon.

From Team Developer to Real Web Applications

Gianluca Pivato — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:28:00 GMT

We are working hard on extending our PPJ Framework to evolve migrated SAL/Team Developer applications on the Cloud and on the Web.

Applications that have been migrated to Real .NET using our solution will be able to:

1) Deploy as Smart Clients and take full advantage of Cloud environments.

2) Become Rich Internet Applications based on Web 2.0 and run in most OS and browsers.

In this blog entry we will focus on the Rich Internet Application option (PPJ Web) and give you a preview of what's possible for developers that have “Joined the Evolution” and finally left SAL behind for a real C#/VB.NET platform.

Put your 3D glasses on. What you are about to see is absolutely amazing!

Click on the images to enlarge the screen shot and enjoy the view, then dream of being able to do the same with your Team Developer applications.

Just to make sure we have explained it correctly. We are presenting a true DHTML/Ajax application running entirely on the server and being used by any browser (Explorer, Firefox, Google, Opera, Safari) on different Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Chrome).

	Unify Team Developer Application This is a simple and common SAL/Team Developer application. Shows a toolbar, tab control, tree control, table window, and other standard Windows controls.
	Dream 1: Web Application Using Gmail Theme! This is the same Unify Team Developer Application shown above ported to Real .NET and Real C# using The Porting Project and deployed as a Real Web Application based on Web 2.0, DHTML/Ajax.
	Dream 2: Web Application With Multiple Forms Using Facebook Theme! Another Team Developer Application migrated to a Real Web Application showing multiple forms in the same workspace. Just amazing...
	Dream 3: Web Application With MDI Interface! This is Google Chrome running a ported Team Developer application showing a standard MDI interface with MDI child forms.
	Dream 4: Web Application with Tabbed MDI Interface Using Analytics Theme! This is a traditional MDI Team Developer application converted to Real .NET and running in Google Chrome. The MDI interface is now shown as modern tab pages.

Like what you see? Contact us to arrange for a webinar and demo of our migration technology.

The only way to migrate your SAL/Team Developer applications to Real .NET and to Cloud or Web environments is The Porting Project. Nothing else even comes close.

Real WPF or crippled WPF?

Gianluca Pivato — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:42:00 GMT

WPF is a great new rendering technlogy from Microsoft. It's based on .NET and offers a huge set of options.

According to Unify, Team Developer 6 will be able to import and use WPF controls.

At a first look it appears that through a combination of reflection and WPF hosting it's true. You will be able to host WPF controls in a SAL application. In fact it can be done easily with TD 1.5, or TD 4.2 already.

I have doubts about the usability of wrapped WPF controls in a language (SAL) that is not really integrated with .NET. So far the implementation that has been divulged by Unify shows a very simple interface based on strings and string arrays. Meaning that to use a WPF control you have to use its methods and properties using string arguments for the method name and parameters. This approach precludes you from creating composite controls, passing objects, receiving objects, prevent syntax errors at compile time (strings cannot be checked by the compiler), and so on...

In any case, Unify made me curious. I started wondering: what if they are onto something? What if it's difficult for a migrated application to use a WPF control? So I tried to use a WPF control, actually a composite control, on a ported form. That is a form originally created in SAL and migrated to C# using our solution. Here it is:

Couldn't be easier. There is no interpreter or converters in between. In C# you can use directly all the methods and fields of the WPF control. No matter how complex they are.

Look at this very simple code from the sample above:

// Update YValue property of the DataPoint 
chart.Series[0].DataPoints[i].YValue = rand.Next(-80, 100);

What would this code look like in using SAL wrappers? I decided to try and started writing some SAL code, just to see what it would look like.

The first part of the C# statement is "chart.Series[0]". In SAL it would look like this (notice that I probably have to use "get_Series" to use the indexer):

String: sIdx[1]
String: sReturn
Set sIdx[0] = "0"
Call SalWPFInvokeMethod(VisiChart, "get_Series", sIdx, sReturn)

Now, the method "get_Series" should have returned a reference to an object of type Series. On this instance I have to call the method "get_DataPoints", right? It's the second part of the C# statement "chart.Series[0].DataPoints[i]".

But sReturn can only return primitive types, so I'm lost at this point... Wait, I can still write the last part of the simple C# statement, assuming that there is (or will be) a way to overcome the previous stumbling block:

String: sArgs[2]
Set sArgs[0] = "-80"
Set sArgs[1] = "100"
Call SalWPFInvokeMethod(VisiChar, "[?]set_YValue", sArgs)

Is this really the kind of syntax you want to work with?

I can see many points of failure in programming with strings and arrays of arguments, so many that I may write a blog just about that. It's like low level C++ code trying to use the old IDispatch interface on COM objects. For me it was a nightmare.

Can You Spell?

Gianluca Pivato — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:47:00 GMT

We take spell-checking for granted in most applications today. Microsoft Word, Outlook, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and even HTML/Text editors on web design tools have built-in spell-checking and syntax error highlighting capabilities. Wouldn't it be nice if your application did it too?

The question is: can you and how? There are many third party components out there that can add spell-checking to your controls, but will they work with Gupta/Unify Team Developer? We don't know and leave it to you (if you are still using SAL) to find out.

If you have moved to C#/VB.NET using our automated migration solution and are now deploying your apps together with the PPJ Framework, we have just made available a development build and source code of a simple and yet powerful spell-checking and syntax highlighting component.

You can find it in our downloads section.

The solution that we are going to use in the PPJ Framework 2011 release uses the popular hunspell open-source library. It's compiled for 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Hunspell is the spell checker for OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Mac OSX, Opera, and soon it will be yours too!

Free dictionaries for virtually every language in the world can be downloaded at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries. Here you will find OXT files that are in fact ZIP archives. Change the extension to ZIP and extract the two .aff and .dic file for the language you have downloaded.

Our implementation is capable of hooking up any WinForms TextBoxBase control, including RichEdit, editable ComboBox controls and grid cells in edit mode. We support three styles for drawing the syntax error underline: Solid, Dotted and ZigZagged. We also support default and custom context menu with words suggestions. Additionally we expose a utility SpellChecker class with several methods that allow developers to use the dictionaries directly.

This is one of the many things you can do once you Join the Evolution. Migrating to TD 6 and ultimately remain with TD and SAL simply doesn't make sense when you cannot use all the modern features in C#, .NET and Visual Studio.

New in C# 4.0: Optional and Named Arguments

Frank Boettcher — Tue, 11 May 2010 04:36:00 GMT

Following the path to bring together their 2 main .NET programming languages,
Microsoft has introduced several language enhancements to C# in their just released version 4.0

Some of these features have been available for VB (.NET) for quite a while but now add comfort
and transparency also to C# based .NET code.

The first language enhancement is optional arguments:

You can now define method arguments that can be omitted when calling that method.
Additionally you can supply default values for such optional arguments.

Imagine a simple sample where you need a function to save a picture blob. You might want to specify the filetype and also an optional percent base scaling.

You can now call this method in the following ways:

Another very useful addition to C# 4.0 are named arguments.
Consider the following method that also includes optional arguments:

When calling that method you can directly assign arguments by their name:

Using named arguments can greatly improve readability and transparency especially with long lists of arguments. With optional arguments you can simplify your method declarations.

Visual Studio 2010 fully supports both named and optional arguments with the build in IntelliSense:

Now try to do this with Team Developer...

What's SAL anyway?

Joe Meyer — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:53:00 GMT

Almost every developer/sales rep has been in the situation where the customer asks which programming language the product is written in. If your application is written in C#/VB.NET, running on .NET, you're fine. No further questions. But what if you have to answer "SAL, using Unify Team Developer"? Your customer will probably ask "Sal, what? Unify, who?". Many times this is already the end of the sales process and the potential customer is lost, no matter how good your application is. Gupta/Centura/Unify is simply not known and therefore not taken into consideration.

The more popular a language is the more it is accepted and the more chances you have to sell your application. But what exactly means "popular"? Well, there's a company that put some work into figuring this out and they came up with a list of languages that people search for most on popular search sites like Google, Yahoo, and others. Find the list at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html.

The list is ordered by the number of searches and the language being searched for the most is on top of the list. C and Java are the leaders. PHP is very popular too but I don't consider it a general purpose language because it is mainly used for web applications only. Visual Basic is still going strong but C# has made it's way up and will continue to increase market share.

On the list you can even find laguages like SAS, MATLAB and LUA which, to be honest, I had never heard of. There's outdated languages like LISP, COBOL, Fortran, Smalltalk and whatever else. A long list of 50 programming languages where the ones at the end of the list have an extremely low market share, they are absolute niche products.

So what about SAL/Team Developer? Not on the list. Nada. Niente. Non existent. It's not even a niche product! Being a SqlWindows developer myself since the 16-bit ages I moved away many many years ago and it turned out to be the right decision. At that time I had to rewrite from scratch because there was no migration tool but times have changed and now The Porting Project offers painless transition to modern platforms. Platforms that don't force you to explain what language you used and who Unify is. The Porting Project makes it easy to switch to a programming language that is widely accepted and that you can find in the top range of languages used by developers worldwide.

Visual Studio 2010 - A different league

Gianluca Pivato — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:56:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 - More of a pleasure to work with when you are used to TD

We are now working with Visual Studio 2010 on the PPJ Framework and also started using it on some migration projects. Well... Coming from years of Gupta/Centura/Gupta/Unify development I'm pretty sure that VS 2010 is simply in a different league.

The incredible productivity increase that a software shop can gain by simply switching from Team Developer to Visual Studio 2010 is astonishing.

One of the many useful features is the new Extension Manager. It connects directly to the Visual Studio Gallery and allows you to find, download and install extensions to Visual Studio. There are hundreds of them:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/

This is a screen shot of the Extension Manager. Developing is more of a pleasure with VS 2010, especially when you are used to fight with TD's outdated limitations and all the recently introduced bugs.

Software is a serious business

Since I have been in the software business (which is many years) I have always adopted the best technology and tools for the job. Sometimes straight assembly is the right fit, some other times C is the right language. There is no one-size-fit-all solution with software. For business applications there is very little doubt for me.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET will pay back the cost of the conversion from TD in very little time. Once your code is secured in .NET the return on investment curve has changed from downward to upward.

There is truly no good reason to keep valuable code locked in a proprietary and outdated technology. Really.

Porting, Migration, and the truth for MD Consulting

Thomas Althammer — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:25:00 GMT

I recently stumbled upon this weird white paper from MD Consulting: http://www.md-consulting.de/PortalData/2/Resources/download_techn_infos/Migration_bestehender_TD-Anwendungen_nach_C_.pdf

It's in german, but the translation is quite clear to understand.

MD talks about the differences between porting and migration. The term porting refers to our technology, The Porting Project. Whereas migration refers to the technology now owned by Unify, a product called Sabertooth. (Unify bought this "migration" technology a few years ago from Active Data for US$ 420k). While both approaches seem pretty similar on first sight, there are differences in terms of concept, functionality, and completeness between the two offerings. We are certainly in agreement on this with MD Consulting.

The whitepaper explains the different implementations of the converted .NET code for SalTblPopulate(), claiming that the Porting Project is actually trying to emulate SAL, while Sabertooth is offering pure and clean C# code that doesn't emulate SAL. This is the code that the two migration technologies produce:

Sabertooth: tbl1.Populate(hSql, "SELECT...", SalGrid.TBL_FillAll);
Porting Project: tbl1.Populate(hSql, "SELECT...", Sys.TBL_FillAll);

Do you see a difference? To me it looks pretty much the same (despite the namespace used for the system constant TBL_FillAll). This is something we did not understand in the whitepaper.

So while we are in agreement on how to best solve migration or porting of SalTblPopulate(), there are some differences in how to implement other items. Let's look at another example:

Data fields in SQLWindows can hold different data types. This is important functionality in terms of data entry and validation. The data type of a data field can be changed by just flipping a property. It is not easy to port this to .NET, because the equivalents to data fields in SQLWindows (named text boxes in .NET), are not aware of data types. All data entry and validation logic has to be done by hand or with custom classes.

Unify's approach to port a data field class of type date/time is to map this to a SalTextBoxDate class that holds all the entry and validation logic. On first sight, not a bad move. But the truth is that this is prone to errors and would have broken many applications that we ported throughout the last years.

Imagine a data field is used as a base class for other data fields. They are derived a couple of times and finally used on a form or in a dialog box. What happens if the data type property is changed somewhere in the inheritance tree? Assume the base class is of type string while the derived class is of type date. If this is done in several places, the conversion process will actually break existing applications (and it would have happened to most applications we ported).

Where is the point in porting or migrating at all? Preserve the existing investments and reduce the risks in going to a new platform and starting from scratch. In a complete rewrite, the development effort is not the most critical effort, it is rather testing and making sure that the application works just like before. That's the reason why many banking, insurance, and flight booking systems are still developed and maintained in COBOL code that has been written 20, 30, 40 years back.

With more than 1000 ported applications, we have found best practices to minimize the risks as much as possible. And we have numerous development teams that consist of both, SQLWindows developers now working in C#, as well as true C# developers that have never used SQLWindows before. They work happily together on ported code and appreciate the fact that they can finally evolve ported applications without throwing away tremendous investments in existing products.

We are confident that we have made the right decisions in our porting library based on the experience of our 100% success rate together with the large list of references that we have made public. Compare the details!

TD 6.0 Benefits

Gianluca Pivato — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:50:00 GMT

Unify has presented the new version of Team Developer at their recent developers conferences in Germany and US. That is TD 6.0 that will be released in 2010.

I looked at the presentations and went through the new features and improvements and I was left with one question: What are the benefits?

To answer this seemingly simple question we have to look at several factors. First we have to identify the stakeholders and their needs. Let’s try.

We have organizations using applications written using TD/SAL. Most of their apps have been written many years ago, have evolved over time, and are working relatively well. Their problems are mainly A) finding (and keeping) resources that know or want to work with a language (SAL) and tool (TD) that is not exactly mainstream technology; and B) consolidating, integrating, deploying and managing several heterogeneous systems across the organization.

There are Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that produce and sell applications based on TD/SAL. Their problems are mainly A) finding (and keeping) resources that know or want to work with TD and SAL; B) compete with other solutions based on mainstream technologies like .NET, Java, Web Applications; C) expand their products adding new modern features, moving to the web using the new Rich Internet Application (RIA) architectures, increase productivity and software quality.

Last but not least, there are developers that have been working with TD/SAL for years and have intimate knowledge of the applications they are working with (in many cases it has been the same application for many years). Their concerns are A) keep their jobs; B) find new jobs if/when they need or want to; C) be happy at what they do and work with exciting and interesting technologies. This last point is not to be underestimated since writing software is still basically an art and developers do enjoy working with code (at least I know I do).

Note: please send me additional issues that I have missed to gianluca-at-iceteagroup.com.

Now that we have identified the three main stakeholders (Corporations IT, Software Companies (ISVs), Gupta Developers) we can try to nail down what are the benefits of TD 6.0. But in order to do so we have to list the most important new features that will be included in TD 6.0.

I found two sets of features: new controls, new compile and deployment.

New controls include a new tab bar (either a third one or an enhancement of the second one added with TD 5.2), outlook-style page navigator, a replacement tree control for the existing Visual Toolchest outline listbox, dockable toolbars, and a list of other minor enhancements.

New deployment is based on a new optional compiler and a new runtime. The new compiler will be able to compile existing SAL code to MSIL op-code instead of SAL p-code, and the new runtime will be written in C# (and/or VB.NET) instead of the current C/C++ runtime.

There isn’t much to say about the new controls since they are not really new. Visual Studio and .NET had all those controls for years including fully integrated and advanced designers.

The new compiler is the most important new feature. TD 6.0 will add a new compiler and runtime to generate Microsoft .NET executables. It is the biggest development undertaking with Team Developer since the release of TD 5.0 in January 2007.

TD 5.0 also added a new compiler and runtime to generate Linux executables. It was largely developed by Gupta Technologies before being acquired. Unify finished the product and released in January ‘07 then recalled it quickly thereafter and ultimately dropped the product.

Now that we have narrowed down the stakeholders and the new features in TD 6.0 we can start answering my original question: What are the benefits?

Let’s do it for each identified issue:

A) Finding (and keeping) resources that know or want to work with TD and SAL. (Organizations and ISVs)

It’s a fact that there are very few developers using TD and SAL. In my opinion TD 6.0 will not change the situation because it doesn’t change the development environment and doesn’t change the language. Organizations and ISVs will still need to find and retain developers for TD and SAL. Finding and retaining resources simply gets harder with time.

B) Consolidating, integrating, deploying and managing several heterogeneous systems across the organization. (Organizations)

Compiling existing SAL code to MSIL may improve the integration of heterogeneous systems, considering that Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for business applications development. Compiled MSIL assemblies from SAL can be used from other .NET systems without having to resort to COM.

However, the new compiler and runtime add a new risk since it’s a completely new compiler written from scratch by Unify (like 5.1 and 5.2) and will not support 100% of existing features.

C) Expand their products adding new modern features, moving to the web using the new Rich Internet Application (RIA) architectures, increase productivity and software quality. (ISVs)

I don’t think that a different binary format would give many advantages to ISVs trying to compete with full .NET, Java, or Web solutions. They may be able to piggy back on .NET marketing buzz by telling prospects that their solution is now compiled to .NET. The fact is that the code is still written using SAL, it’s hard to find resources; there are very few if any third party components; the runtime is based on proprietary libraries; the new compiler is an entirely new and big software undertaking with all its risks, etc.

Moreover, TD 6.0 doesn’t add support for Web Applications, doesn’t use .NET controls, and doesn’t add LINQ, Generics, Delegates, Reflection, and many of the features found in C# or VB.NET.

D) Keep their job or find new jobs if/when they need or want to. (Developers)

If TD 6.0 extends the life of SAL applications then existing Gupta developers will certainly have a better chance of keeping their jobs. For finding new jobs, any developer knows that it’s always better to expand one’s skills and learning Visual Studio .NET and C# or Eclipse and Java is the wise thing to do.

I just hope that Gupta developers working on TD 6.0 SAL code day in and day out can find the time and the opportunity to work on other projects where C# or Java are being used.

E) Be happy at what they do and work with exciting and interesting technologies. (Developers)

Well, this one is both objective and subjective at the same time. If a developer is happy working with TD and SAL, there is nothing to argue, it's taste. I have been working very happily with TD and SAL for years.

However, it’s an objective fact that SAL is not an exciting technology anymore being designed in 1983 (or was it 1984?), which is about 25 years ago. To be fair, the problem is not just the age. Java was first released in 1996 (that is 13 years ago). But I consider Java still exciting being a cross platform development environment, and having countless libraries for just about anything and on any platform.

C# and .NET (sorry I still don’t like VB.NET like I didn’t like VB6) are to me the most exciting and innovative technologies. Visual Studio 2008 (and the upcoming 2010) is a pleasure to work with and offers tools and development support that are a dream for a developer.

Working with C# gives you the feeling that there are no limits to what you can do and the speed at which you can do it. I’m also a C/C++ and Assembly developer and working with C# simply beats everything I have been working with for the past 28 years!

Let’s tally up my informal analysis and let’s see what we got. I used values from 0 to 5 where 0 = “No change from today” and 5 = “Big benefits”.

But to make it more interesting (not forgetting that the company I work for offers seamless migration from TD/SAL all versions to C# or VB.NET on Visual Studio), I have added a column comparing with Visual Studio .NET.

Issue	TD 6.0 and SAL	Visual Studio .NET and C#/VB.NET
A) Find and keep resources	0	5
B) Consolidate, Integrate, Deploy	2	4
C) Expand market share, Compete	1	5
D) Keep jobs, find new jobs	1	5
E) Be happy, work with exciting stuff	2	3
Total	6	22

According to my non scientific analysis we get a score of 6 for TD 6.0 and 22 for Visual Studio and .NET.

Which means that in my opinion TD 6.0 improves very little on the current TD 5.2 when it comes down to the issues that I have listed.

While moving to Visual Studio .NET and C# (remember that I still don’t like VB.NET…), again in my opinion, yields huge benefits for the same issues.

Case closed? Nope. I neglected one important factor: Cost.

What is the cost of migrating to TD 6.0/SAL and what is the cost of migrating to Visual Studio .NET/C#?

Some will tell you that migrating to TD 6.0/SAL is basically cost free and going to .NET is enormously expensive. Others may tell you the opposite.

The truth is obviously in the middle and you have to define cost first. Cost is not just paying for the GLS [Update: Unify announced that TD 6.0 with the .NET compiler will NOT be part of the GLS, you will have to buy a new license]. Productivity, market opportunities, resources, total cost of ownership (TCO), maintenance, risk mitigation effort, test and QA, are all cost components.

Taking all the proper factors in consideration including cost saving items, in my humble opinion, brings up the cost of migrating to TD 6.0 (the more factors you put in the more the cost goes up), and brings down the final cost of migrating to .NET.

Expanding the time frame for the calculation of the return on investment (ROI) may even show that a migration project to .NET pays for itself and could return huge benefits.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask us to show you. We are here and in this case it costs zero to be prepared for the future, this is for sure.

Until supplies last!

Gianluca Pivato — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:57:00 GMT

XSal2 is now free!

Yes, you can download the installer for all versions of Gupta/Centura/Gupta/Unify Team Developer (including the latest shining 5.2 version!)

And... you can download the full source code also for free.

Hurry up, this offer is valid until supplies last.

www.iceteagroup.com/Products/FreeDownloads.aspx

Ready for Windows 7?

Gianluca Pivato — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Gupta developers that migrated to .NET are ready for Windows 7 new features. This is one of the many benefits of migrating. You don't have to wait for us, or for Unify/Gupta, to catch up with Microsoft.

Once you are on a .NET C# or VB.NET and Visual Studio you can immediately use any .NET extension and library as they are made available by anyone. There is no other way of doing this.

Integration with the new Taskbar is only one of the many new features available in Windows 7 that are immediately and reliably available to .NET developers.

You can find an informative blog about integration with W7 here:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/03/30/windows-7-net-interop-sample-libraries.aspx

And you can find the full W7 integration managed libraries here:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack

Be aware that Microsoft has been adding integration libraries using the new Class Extension feature of .NET 3.5.

If you are still convinced that sticking it out with an obsolete technology is the way to go, please attend one of our personal webinars and have an open technical and business oriented session with us. In the worst case we both learn something.

First Porting Conference!

Gianluca Pivato — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:43:00 GMT

Finally, I found some time to write this blog about our first Worldwide Porting Partners Conference!

A couple of weeks ago we met for two days in Frankfurt with all our partners. We had attendees from Australia, United Kingdom, Brasil, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and United States.

For two days Ice Tea Group presented a new incredible technology that will allow migrated Gupta applications to benefit from state-of-the-art Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and to become Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using AJAX and Silverlight technologies.

We explored in details how porting to .NET has grown into a solid enterprise-grade solution that is much more than "just" changing the Gupta code to C# or VB.NET. It's about evolving to a new technology, it's a quality jump that cannot be done without shedding the old Gupta "shell".

Porting to .NET using our technology means having options. Having options is a fundamental strategy for all businesses of all kinds. Options allow organizations to evolve in order to survive and thrive.

But what are these options that we provide? Just to briefly name a few:

Service Oriented Architecture

Using the PPJ Services migrated applications can execute reports on a server using any of the supported reporting engines (Crystal Reports, Reporting Services, List & Labels).

Remote, click-once and Browser Applications (XBAP) can access the database through a high availability web service running in the safety of a Windows Communication Foundation (WFC) server or IIS.

Multi-tier systems can consume ported business logic objects managed by a PPJ Services object server running anywhere.

Rich Internet Applications

Using ground-breaking technology, ported Gupta applications are cleanly split into a extra-thin visual layer and a server-optimized business and visual logic layer. The visual-rendering layer supports both AJAX and Silverlight!

Cloud Computing

All services are optimized to work in a cloud-computing environment. Network bandwith and CPU usage are optimized. Military-grade security is built-in. Resources are ready to be load-balanced and relocated using several industry-standard technologies.

These are all options and are all optional. It means that when an organization decides to Join the Evolution and migrate to .NET with us they don't have to adopt all these technologies. They can do it at any time and can pick and chose what makes sense to them.

With us the migration to .NET takes place only once. After that the evolution starts.

With Team Developer 6.0 the porting process starts every time you compile for .NET and everytime you change the code in SAL. But this is a topic for a different blog...

C# 4.0 fits our plans perfectly

Gianluca Pivato — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:52:00 GMT

We have a long range plan for the evolution of Gupta/Centura (and now Unify) systems to Microsoft .NET and to new technologies. And apparently Microsoft is catching up with us :)

C# 4.0 adds a long list of features that would make many developers salivate to use them right away. What has attracted my interest the most is the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and how it perfectly fits our Gupta migration technology.

In short, the new DLR features in C# 4.0 introduce dynamic objects and dynamic language integration directly into the core .NET system. This allows a developer to implement methods and properties without declaring them. It's a sort of "compilation on the fly" feature. As usual, a code snippet is worth a thousand words:

dynamic test = new MyTest();

test.Text = "No way I can do this in SAL!";

test.HelloWorld();

test = test + test;

...

class MyTest : DynamicObject

{

public override bool TryInvokeMember(...) {}

public override bool TryBinaryOperation(...) {}

}

See that? You can reference non-existing members in a dynamic object and your dynamic methods will be called at runtime and allow you to do just about anything, including creating your own specialized language.

Actually, talking about specialized language, Microsoft also added complete support for dynamic script compilers and interpreters.

We already have that in the PPJ Framework in order to support dynamic SQL binding and we are already using a very fast dynamic IL generation compiler to achieve tremendous speed when binding SQL parameters and intos. However, in future versions of the PPJ we will take full advantage of the new DLR to make our SQL binding layer much smaller and even faster.

C# 4.0 is perfectly timed for us and for our plans. We have not unveiled the full power of the new PPJ Services solution (our ground breaking technology to move Gupta/Centura applications to the Cloud) and I will not disclose it here. But I can say that the new dynamic objects feature (see code snippet above) allows us to complete a large piece of the PPJ Services solution in a much shorter period of time and in a perfectly integrated way.