When Worlds Collide–PowerBuilder User Group

Many of you know that I came to Microsoft after working for nearly twelve years at Sybase (now an SAP Company), almost exclusively with the PowerBuilder developer community.  While PowerBuilder is not the shiny object it was when it spawned the client-server development phenomenon of the early to mid-90s, it’s continued to steadily evolve. 

At version 12, the ‘classic’ version supports building native Win32 applications and deploying that same code (with a few tweaks here and there) as ASP.NET Web Forms and WInForms.  A new companion IDE shipped along with the classic version (and based on the Visual Studio shell) additionally brings PowerBuilder applications into the XAML-world by enabling the deployment of WPF applications.

Since PowerBuilder and PowerBuilder developers are a part of the overall Microsoft ecosystem, I thought it might be fun to merge my roots with my latest penchant, Windows Azure and Cloud Computing, so I’ll be presenting on PowerBuilder and the Cloud at the Connecticut PowerBuilder User Group meeting this Thursday.  The abstract goes like this:

Over the past year or so, if you’re a technologist, you’ve been assailed on all sides by yet another revolutionary paradigm – cloud computing. Is it all that revolutionary? What do you need to know about it? Why would you use it? And, most importantly, how does it affect you as a PowerBuilder developer? Join Microsoft Developer Evangelist (and former Sybase Principal Systems Consultant for PowerBuilder), Jim O’Neil, for a hype-less look at cloud computing, focusing on Microsoft Azure and potential integration points with PowerBuilder. Attendees will also get an access code for a 30-day trial period of Windows Azure and SQL Azure to do their own experimentation in the cloud.

Here are all the particulars, and please RSVP so we have an accurate count for pizza, which is on me!

Oh yeah, I guarantee that nothing will blow up when my worlds collide!