Migration of PowerBuilder 4.0 to PowerBuilder 12?

Question

I am new to power builder. for past one year i was using asp.net and mssql. Latest project is about migration of Power Builder from older version (version 4) to latest version (version 12).

Please help me to know more details about the migration and how can i migrate one complete project and also what all should i learn or do for the migration.

Thanking you in advance

-sid-

Answer 1

You can migrate directly from 4 to 12.

In version 5 they eliminated the SetReturnCode function in favor of setting the function return value with the Return statement.

In version 8 they completely revamped the IDE, introducing the concept of Workspaces and Targets.

In version 10, string and char variables became Unicode (2 bytes per character) instead of Ansi (1 byte per character).

Those are the biggest differences.

Answer 2

Roland gave a good overview of the "right" things to look out for: things done by design. I want to warn you about the "wrong" things: issues created by bad programming.

I've easily done dozens of migrations, and the toughest problems weren't those changes that Powersoft / Sybase / SAP documented. Sometimes programmers found an unintended behaviour of a function and relied on it, so when it was fixed, his code broke. Some reverse engineered an event sequence through observation, coded a dependence on this sequence, and when that sequence changed from a PB upgrade, OS upgrade or even a hardware configuration change (I've seen faster processors or more memory do this), the functionality fails. More often than I want to admit, programmers reach the end of their understanding solving a problem, and instead of extending their grasp, they flail until they stumble on a solution, with no idea how stable or precarious it is. I've seen one programmer advise another "Try a Yield() and see if that does anything." I threw up on the spot. (OK, maybe only in my mind, but still...)

PowerBuilder migrations can be the smoothest you could ever run into. At one point I was maintaining code in multiple versions of PB, and literally did multiple migrations per day without a hitch. However, as with most tools, the difficulty you'll run into will go up exponentially with the quantity of garbage code in your system.

Good luck,

Terry