We may have seen the bottom. After three years of IT dark ages, there's some real evidence that after years of budget cuts, 2004 promises more jobs and projects for all of us.

Over the past 10 years, corporations have experienced a dramatic change in the way they store and process information. In the early 1990s corporate information systems tended to be isolated from one another.

I can't believe it's almost 2004. Sounds so futuristic right? By now I'm sure all of you work 35-hour weeks and take two-month vacations. Your office is a relic of the past. With advances in teleconferencing and telecommunications, you all work comfortably in your home.

Over the past three years I have witnessed many rounds of layoffs. I consider myself lucky. Since 1996 I have worked exclusively on a consulting basis. So in theory, I have no job to lose. This, of course, means I always have to look for a job, since no project lasts forever.

Over the past 20 years the economy has lost over four million jobs. Although some of these jobs have disappeared because of increased productivity, most of them have been exported overseas to countries with low-cost labor such as China and Pakistan.

It's not sexy to be a computer geek anymore. A former student of mine, a 31-year-old Web designer, recalls a time in the late 1990s when she was lured by sugar-coated dot-com dreams.

Happy TechWave everyone! The other day John Olson and I had a conversation with Karen Frederiksen, the new director for PowerBuilder. After brief introductions she asked us our opinion on PowerBuilder and its future; I think we scared her off.

I have a secret for you: most IT workers are concerned with the current state of events in our industry. I am as well. In these tumultuous times, most of us would like to find a bit of stability. I think I've found the job for us. Let's all become COBOL programmer...

Over the past six months I have been working with programmers with Visual Basic backgrounds. Usually this is a recipe for disaster - like getting dog people and cat people in the same room. With the .NET languages in full swing, and PowerBuilder transformed into a...

Who says DataWindows can't get any better. Since the inception of PowerBuilder, the DataWindow has been a cornerstone of client/server software development.

It's taken a while, but over the past six months a client of mine has finally gotten around to building distributed applications in PowerBuilder. In another life I've been building distributed applications for over three years; it's refreshing to do this in PowerB...

From the beginning, the DataWindow has been a powerful client/server control. What has set it apart from competing products is its ability to create SQL. In reality, the DataWindow is a SQL-generating machine. By keeping track of row and column statuses, the DataW...

Being an inquisitive teacher I'm always searching the Web looking for educational offerings. For the past 10 years I've made my living teaching at a university. When class is not in session, I take my show on the road and visit training rooms throughout corporate America.

Objects can be added to your DataWindow programmatically via a Modify statement. In my opinion, the dynamic creation of objects within a DataWindow has been a highly underused feature.

He sits across the desk from you and you feel like you're talking to your father. According to his résumé, he started out on IBM mainframes and speaks fluent COBOL. You've never actually seen COBOL. He took a PowerBuilder class recently, but he's never used it on ...

You're all ready to go. The project has been approved and you're in charge of setting up the development environment. This article discusses some of the recent changes in the PowerBuilder project development process, and how your team can leverage both old and new...

Tech workers, stunned by rounds of layoffs in the aftermath of the dot-com crash and the downturn in the economy, continue to hit a wall in a labor market that has fewer jobs, lower salaries, pickier bosses, and a new job requirement: soft skills.

In my early PowerBuilder days, I was very impressed with how easy it was to create and format DataWindows for either online or printed reports. At its easiest, a simple print method is required to send a 'What you see is what you get' version of the DataWindow to ...

Something about the DataWindow gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, like a sleeping child with a security blanket. The DataWindow has been like a good luck charm hanging on my rearview mirror.

The DataWindow has been around since the first version of PowerBuilder and is indeed the reason many shops have chosen PB. Around for over 10 years, it has remained the most powerful data control in any language.

The first wave of wireless applications flopped badly. Does anyone remember the commercial that shows a young man lying on the beach with his PalmPilot? It goes something like this: a stressed businessman doesn't want to leave the office to go on vacation.

I have to warn you, I've already had too much coffee this morning. I realize my comments this month are a bit on the edge and a slight departure from the norm. I have an idea for PowerBuilder - not just any idea, but one that will place PowerBuilder back in the mainstream.

When is 'tech' going to rebound? Like many people in the industry, I get this question a lot. After waiting two years, we are all still waiting. Now it looks as if technology spending will remain flat through 2003.

PB Code Analyzer is a suite of useful development tools that works with all recent versions of PowerBuilder. Some of the more notable tools allow developers to check coding standards, create user reports, view object relationships (cross-references), document cod...

Do you remember the old days of software development? It wasn't that long ago when we were developing software on machines with very limited memory and the disk capacity of my watch. With every line of code, we'd take careful calculated steps to conserve system ...

The PFC error service allows applications to have a standard interface in which to display error messages to the user and log error messages to a disk file. In addition, the service e-mails the error to a system administrator (if a MAPI-compliant e-mail system exists).

Welcome to TechWave! I can't believe it's that time of year again. To be honest, I always struggle for a topic for the TechWave issue. I was going to write about 'Where Do We Go from Here' or 'PowerBuilder and the Future,' but both topics are overwritten and seem a bit predictable.

Summertime. Just the mention of the word conjures up thoughts of picnics, baseball, and long lazy evenings under the stars. Summer is also the season for interns. Now this is a touchy subject, and not just for our former president. All year we complain that our...

I've been in the XML world for about two years now - a dinosaur at today's rate. Still, I have problems with understanding conceptual and syntax issues of WSDL and XML Schema - especially the latter. In addition to being complex, XML Schema and WSDL are relatively...

Most families have a member who bestows shame on the rest of the clan. For every 20 or so family members, there's a drunken cousin Ted, who has always been an embarrassment. He gets drunk at weddings and starts fights at his children's little league games. We all ...

Every five years or so a technology emerges that makes us reevaluate the way we write business applications. Guess what? It's that time again - time for our skillsets to be updated. Five years ago, the big wave was distributed programming. The current big wave, re...

This article is an overview of the structure of a Java program. My goal is to introduce the Java language to PowerBuilder programmers, pointing out striking similarities between the two languages. Although there may be some value in the simplicity of a 'Hello, wor...

I starting reading PBDJ in 1995, just when PowerBuilder was becoming big. At that time, only seven years ago, PowerBuilder was the most popular client/server development tool. The buzz was incredible. Just mentioning the word PowerBuilder would draw thousands of d...