http://www.consultingwerk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/CustomizingOpenEdgeArchitect/Customizing_OpenEdge_Architect.pdf

The sample code can be downloaded here:

http://www.consultingwerk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/ExtremeWindowsDesktop/ExtremeWindowsDesktopIntegration_Samples.zip

The OpenEdge Architect project is currently set up for OpenEdge 11, however the source code should be compatible with OpenEdge 10.2B as well. If you are going to use the files with OpenEdge 10.2B make sure to update the contained assemblies.xml file so that it matches the version of the Infragistics/OpenEdge Ultra Controls you are using.

The slides from the workshop can be downloaded here:

http://www.consultingwerk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/ExtremeWindowsDesktop/Extreme_Windows_Desktop_Integration.pdf

The first opportunity is the 16^th of April with the Progress Technologie Happen (English Technology-Bites, http://www.prgtechupdates.de/de/) session hosted by Progress Software Germany in Cologne. Mike Fechner will be presenting various opportunities to modernize Progress or OpenEdge based applications using object orientation, GUI for .NET, the OpenEdge Reference Architecture, mobile devices or OpenEdge BPM / Savvion / Progress Control Tower. This session was very successfully hosted by Progress Software in the UK on two February dates in London and Leeds.

On the 24th of April Mike Fechner will be hosting a workshop on “Extreme Windows Desktop Integration” at the PUG UK spring conference (http://www.puguk.org). In this Progress Arcade cloud based workshop you’ll have the chance to experience how easy it is with OpenEdge 11 to use .NET technology from any Progress application running under OpenEdge 11 to become a first class citizen on the Windows Desktop. See http://puguk.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=210&Itemid=102 for details.

Later that week Marko Rüterbories will be attending the inaugural meeting of the Hungarian Progress user group in Budapest on the 27th of April and will present our OpenEdge modernization and productivity solutions WinKit and the SmartComponent Library. The website of the Hungarian PUG can be found at http://pug.hu

On the 4^th of May Mike Fechner will be giving a presentation at the German PUG meeting in Hamburg. Details about this event can be found at the PUG Germany homepage at http://www.pug.de/xoops/modules/news/article.php?storyid=64

The German PUG meeting is followed by the PUG Challenge Americas conference in Westford, MA from the 6^th to the 9^th of May (http://pugchallenge.org). Mike Fechner will be holding three break-out presentations. Consultingwerk will also be showcasing our OpenEdge application modernization and productivity tools at our booth at the solutions Expo. Consultingwerk is commercial sponsor of the PUG Challenge Americas Conference. If you want to talk to us, please hurry up! Due to scheduling conflicts we won’t be able to attend the PUG Challenge Americas conference on the Wednesday.

In June Marko Rüterebories and Mike Fechner will be attending the Nordic PUG Conference on the Åland Island in the Baltic Sea on the 14^th and 15^th of June (http://pugnordic.org/). Consultingwerk is commercial sponsor of the conference and will giving two technical breakout sessions as well as product presentations of the SmartComponent Library framework for GUI for .NET, mobile devices, OpenEdge BPM and Web and the WinKit. Consultingwerk will also be showcasing at the solutions expo during the conference.

If none of these dates work for you, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at info@consultingwerk.de – and we’ll find a way to give you an individual presentation online or in person.

See http://pugchallenge.org/agenda.html for details.

Mike Fechner will be presenting on the following topics:

• Cross-Platform Mobile Phone Development (iPhone, iPad, Android) for OpenEdge Back-Ends Using .NET
• Customizing OpenEdge Architect (for non Java-Developers!)
• What is GUI for .NET and Why Aren’t I Using It? (or GUI for .NET for Dummies)

Critical Alert: Issues migrating applications that use ActiveX/COM objects to OpenEdge 11: http://progresscustomersupport-survey.force.com/OpenEdgeKB/articles/Critical_Alert/000028532

Due to a change to the latest Microsoft Visual Studio compiler that Progress Software is using for building the OpenEdge client products and the activation of additional security settings (DEP, Data Execution Prevention) some Active X Controls may fail to execute properly in OpenEdge GUI applications after migrating to OpenEdge 11. Those issues are not specific to the OpenEdge client and can be seen with other C++ applications built using the latest Microsoft Visual Studio compiler and the same security settings.

As the knowledge base article suggests, as the application programmer you need to check with your Active X Control vendor if they have a more recent version of their Controls available that complies with the DEP security settings of the Visual Studio Compiler.

Another alternative – especially advisable when the Active X Control vendor does not provide a more recent version of the Control in question – is to consider migrating parts of your application or the whole application to the OpenEdge GUI for .NET. Our WinKit toolkit and consulting services simplify the integration of any existing OpenEdge GUI application into the GUI for .NET. Our WinKit will replace standard elements of the classical OpenEdge GUI with Infragistics .NET Controls (OpenEdge UltraControls) and embed other GUI elements into .NET Forms in a way that leaves the existing screen- und business logic mostly unchanged. The migrated application provides a platform for further integration of .NET features and Controls. As such the migrated application provides an optimal starting point to replace Active X Controls with .NET Controls.

Active X Controls working properly in the classic OpenEdge GUI of OpenEdge 11 will also work with embedded windows and the WinKit. So when using the WinKit a change from using Active X Controls to .NET Controls is only required when your Active X Control vendor does not provide you with an updated version or you are seeing other technical benefits from migrating certain Active X Controls to .NET Controls (like enhanced functionality or a more recent look and feel).

Questions? Interested? Please use the feedback form, check out http://www.consultingwerk.de/winkit/ or email us at info@consultingwerk.de

In any case we do recommend that everybody using Active X Controls checks with their Control vendor long before migrating to OpenEdge 11 if their Controls are compatible with Visual Studio 2010 and DEP (Data Execution Prevention). Certainly a combination known to every support organization at every Active X Control vendor…

For the time being every Form that has been created or just opened with the 10.2B05 OpenEdge Architect Visual Designer will write code like this to the InitializeComponent method:

bindingSource1:UseFullFieldNames = FALSE.

This will fail to compile on OpenEdge 10.2B Service Pack 4 and earlier releases! So your source code is no longer backwards compatible and this makes the management of deployments (especially of hot fixes ships to your end customers) much more complicated. The compile time error message indicating this issue is something like this:

Could not locate element ‘UseFullFieldNames’ in class ‘Progress.Data.BindingSource’. (12979)

It’s absolutely safe to just remove the lines that set the UseFullFieldNames property to False from the InitializeComponent method. However this needs to be done over and over again as the OpenEdge Architect Visual Designer will keep on adding it to the source code.

Progress support has confirmed this issue and we expect that this annoyance will be fixed with OpenEdge 10.2B Service Pack 6 and OpenEdge 11.1.0.

However when you set the value of the UseFullFieldNames to True in the Visual Designer you have intentionally given up the source code compatibility with Service Pack 4 and before anyway. So we recommend that you carefully line up the usage of this feature with your deployment strategy anyway…

For your reference and convenience we are presenting here the presentation slides and sample material where appropriate for download.

Marko Rüterbories – Extreme Windows Desktop Integration

Windows is still the most relevant platform for desktop applications. With the introduction of the GUI for .NET the ability to use the .NET framework to interact with Windows desktop resources is simpler and more sophisticated than ever and accessible for everybody developing classic OpenEdge GUI or GUI for .NET applications. In this session Marko Rüterbories will give practical introductions and provide downloadable examples for using the .NET technology to access the Windows API, including starting, querying and stopping external processes, file system operations, Drag and Drop to and from the Windows Explorer, Drag and Drop to Microsoft Office applications like Outlook or Word, using Windows 7 advanced taskbar features (jumplists and overlay icons), notify icons and desktop alerts. Using these features the end user will experience a richer integration of the ABL application into the Windows Desktop as well as practical productivity gains.

Mike Fechner – OpenEdge and OpenEdge BPM Cross-Plattform mobile phone development (iPhone, iPad, Android and .NET) using .NET

You end users demand good user interfaces on their mobile devices? AJAX does not sizzle? Offline capabilities? Looking at the numbers of good quality apps in today’s mobile phone appstores there is no doubt that mobile phone applications are a huge market. In my consulting activities I have met almost no Progress partner that says we do not need mobile apps at all… But how? The two big players in the field (Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android) are built using completely different platforms and tools and do not allow any common code. Microsoft’s Windows Phone might become the third relevant player. .NET might be the solution! The session introduces .NET mobile phone development for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, how it allows code reuse and how it can be connected to OpenEdge, OpenEdge BPM and Savvion applications.

Mike Fechner & Marko Rüterbories: OpenEdge Architect – Getting Started & Practical Tips Workshop

In this practical hands-on workshop we will cover the basic steps of moving from an AppBuilder / Progress Procedure Editor based development scenario to OpenEdge Architect and highlight strategies for using both tools at the same time. We will introduce and use some of OpenEdge Architect’s coolest productivity features and discover challenges and solutions for using OpenEdge Architect in a team of developers.

Commercial presentation: SmartComponent Library

The SmartComponent Library delivers true productivity when developing OpenEdge Reference Architecture (OERA) compliant applications using OpenEdge GUI for .NET and the Visual Designer. It brings data-centric design to OpenEdge Architect with flexible wizards and templates as well as rich and powerful foundation classes and allows focussing on what’s really important. Recent additions to the framework allow the extension of user interfaces to mobile devices such and iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The tight integration of the OpenEdge BPM completes the feature list. This presentation will give an overview of the SmartComponent Library capabilities and the design process and demonstrate the integration of the OpenEdge BPM and the Apple iPad.

Commercial presentation: WinKit – Modernise your ABL GUI

The WinKit is the unique tool to simplify the adoption of OpenEdge GUI for .NET in existing OpenEdge GUI applications. The WinKit uses the new user interface technology to enhance the visual appearance of any existing OpenEdge GUI applications with features and components like modern toolbars or Ribbon controls, Dockable Panes, powerful Grids, TabFolders and optionally MDI. The WinKit has been designed to integrate into any framework and application architecture.

This demonstration will provide an overview of the capabilities of the WinKit and how it can be used to improve the capabilities of every Progress or OpenEdge application as well as present examples from real-world projects that have been migrated using the WinKit.

A must read for every OpenEdge GUI for .NET developer at: http://communities.progress.com/pcom/message/142693#142693

Within C# you just combine the desired keys using a bitwise or operator and then cast the result to System.Windows.Forms.Shortcut.

To achieve the same in the ABL you first have to combine the desired key enum values using the bitwise or operator (Progress.Util.EnumHelper:Or) and cast the result to Int32 (Progress.Util.CastUtil:ToInt32) and convert that into an Enum object of the type (System.Windows.Forms.Shortcut)  using (System.Enum:ToObject). Finally you can cast that object reference to the System.Windows.Forms.Shortcut type.

The object referenced in the instance variable oShortcut can then be assigned to for example the Infragistics.Win.UltraWinToolbars.SharedProps:Shortcut property related to a ButtonTool object.

As a slightly more usual example is the following code which creates a shortcut ALT + A, which is typically used by menu mnemonics and thus not foreseen in the Shortcuts collection.

The new version of the SmartComponent Library is compatible with OpenEdge 10.2B Service Packs 3 through 5. However on Service Pack 5 this version of the SmartComponent Library is not compatible with the use of the new property UseFullFieldNames of the Progress.Data.BindingSource component. This property will change the way how the ProBindingSource will expose the names of the fields of the source Buffer, Query or ProDataset to .NET Controls. Setting this property to True (Default is False) will cause that the column names of the BindingSource will consist of the buffer and the field name separated by a colon. We are going to release a version of the SmartComponent Library with support for this feature during October. Until this time we advise you not to use this property at all as we are aware of a list of severe issues!

Even with the changes that we are going to introduce in the next release the usage of this property will cause incompatibility of your application source code with clients running any version of OpenEdge prior to OpenEdge 10.2B Service Pack 5!

Among other enhancements, the new release does introduce the ability to modify (create, change, delete) multiple records of a Business Entity and submit them in a single request to the backend and process them there in a single transaction. The WinKit namespace/package (Consultingwerk.WindowIntegrationKit.*) is now also part of the SmartComponent Library distribution. We are using the WinKit already internally in some utilities for developers that we are going to ship to our clients in the near future. As such, the Consultingwerk\products.i file will be shipped by us with the WinKit preprocessor activated. Customers that do not require the WinKit may change this setting and not integrate the files from the Consultingwerk\WindowIntegrationKit directory. Customers that are using a customized version of the WinKit will also have to be carefully with these files!

The full list of changes is accessible here: http://wiki.dynamics4.net/D4wiki/SmartComponentLibrary/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNote022

Consultingwerk has started testing the SmartComponent Library on the beta version of OpenEdge 11. Until the release of OpenEdge 11 we will start using OpenEdge 11 features such as interface inheritance and the JSON parser for a more lightweight implementation of serializable parameter objects or the integration of the Client Principal object in the communication between client and AppServer to support the usage of Multi Tenancy. Customers interested in getting OpenEdge 11 beta versions of the SmartComponent Library should contact us. However you will need to participate in Progress Software beta program as well to run the code.

The sample application now also uses the OpenXML Libraries from ABC Consulting Ltd. (http://www.oehive.org/taxonomy/term/905) to demonstrate the generation of an order confirmation Word Document. Some files in the src/slobooxml directory are only available in compiled form.

Consultingwerk is now on facebook! Click “like” on our facebook page to stay informed about new releases from Consultingwerk: http://www.facebook.com/Consultingwerk

A further note: The Early Bird discount for the EMEA PUG Challenge, November 3rd and 4th in Amsterdam is still bookable before October 7th. Please refer to http://goo.gl/cQxdy for details.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!