An alternative IDE for Sybase Powerbuilder

Question

Does anyone know of an alternative IDE for Sybase Powerbuilder? It feels pretty clunky, after working with VS2008 and Eclipse.

If not, has anyone successfully worked with this language outside the IDE? I'm not against using a simple text editor, but I find edit-import-regenerate-test-export-edit is clunkier than simply using the Powerbuilder editor.

To date, the only tools I have had any success with are:

• PowerGen, for builds (with NUnit and CruiseControl.NET)
• ConTEXT, which has syntax highlighting for Powerbuilder
• PBL Peeper, which has some interesting features not present in the IDE

EDIT: I added a bounty to draw some wider attention to the question. It would be a very nice thing to have, if it exists.

EDIT: Well that was disappointing. The bounty apparently did not cause even 1 new person to look at the question.

Answer 1

None that I'm aware of, although you could probably use a source control tool, edit in your source control repository, and Get Latest Version from the PB IDE to shorten your text editor cycle. Be warned that there are hacks required to edit anything over 128 ASCII. (My guess is that this is to allow everything Unicode to be source controlled in the most restrictive source control tools.)

As Paul said, PB12 is coming with based on the Visual Studio shell, and will include things like collapsible code blocks, Intellisense, etc.... However, for PB12, this will only be used for WPF targets and a few .NET-type targets (like assemblies), last I heard. Win32 targets will continue to use the "classic" IDE.

Good luck,

Terry.

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P.S. Thanks for the PBL Peeper compliment.

Answer 2

The PowerBuilder IDE is clunky, but I don't think developing completely outside the PowerBuilder IDE is a good idea. I think there are just too many dependencies right now.

However, the IDE for PowerBuilder 12 will be built using Microsoft's Visual Studio Isolated Shell so it ought to be much better when that is released. Also, I believe they'll be doing away with the PBL format which ought to make source control much easier to work with.

Certainly something to watch.