Der Leviathan

Ok, I can’t resist this wordplay . Inspired by the article of Arthur Hefti I started to build a small application to build a bridge between Powerbuilder’s and Silverlight’s world. It’s a shoutbox to show and enter entries from non-registered users.

Silverlight

Every beginning is difficult. So my advantage was, that I have some experience with C# and Visual Studio. If yout want to start with Silverlight I recommend the tutorial here. I did it and my result can be found here.

Shoutbox

The concept is, that a powerbuilder webservice takes care about saving, deleting and loading entries from or to a Microsoft SQL Server database. The Silverligt frontend can use this functions to provide the functionality to the user. It sounds so easy, but it was a hard way .

At least you can find the result here.

Powerbuilder and Silverlight

The target of the example was to find out how Powerbuilder can interact with the silverlight technology. I big advantage of silverlight ist XAML. XAML is xml-based language to describe the user interface. I determine, that there is only a few C#-Code needed at least. With the Powerbuilder .NET Assembly-Feature it could be easy to compile wrapper classes for your Powerbuilder business logic and call it by Silverlight. Or you can use SOAP like Arthur Hefti and I did.

Here is the code

pb_shoutbox.zip

dotnet_shoutbox.zip