Sybase Revives PowerBuilder

PowerBuilder 12 adds native support for Microsoft Presentation Foundation and a variety of tools intended to make it easier to migrate applications from a 32-bit Windows framework to full Microsoft.Net compatibility.

According to PowerBuilder product manager Sue Dunnell, the latest version of PowerBuilder 12 is aimed primarily at the core group of developers that have relied on PowerBuilder to create Windows applications over the years. Many of these developers now need to upgrade those applications to run on Microsoft. Net.

But longer term, Dunnell says Sybase is committed to converting more developers that favor Visual Studio tools from Microsoft to the Sybase development platform by adding more support for technologies such as the Silverlight Web application environment that Microsoft brought out last year.

At the end of the day, Dunnell says PowerBuilder 12 allows enterprise developers to create applications using the company’s Data Window technology, now written in C#, that makes it much easier for developers to create and manipulate business logic while writing much fewer lines of code. As the number of application projects increase, Dunnell said more developers will come to appreciate the capabilities of PowerBuilder 12