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Newsletter Archive - January 2010

Table of Contents

1. Welcome, from Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier
2. Educational Videos on Visual Designer and GUI for .NET Now Available, by John Sadd
3. Updated Courseware: Apama® Fundamentals, by Melissa Spurr
4. New Documentation Task Maps added to the OpenEdge® 10.2B Documentation, by Michael Linnehan
5. Progress rakes in awards at annual competitions, by Bryan Davis
6. Easing Architect Migration, by James Willis

Welcome from Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services

Greetings and Happy New Year to all of you, our valued customers in the worldwide Progress community. We wish you a successful year and hope you achieve your best ever business operational responsiveness.

For this first edition of the 2010 Education Quarterly Newsletter we offer up five articles that center on new or enhanced documentation and education deliverables that will help you more quickly and effectively use our Progress technologies.

First up is John Sadd, Progress Engineering Fellow, with a summary of new educational videos for customers using the OpenEdge® Architect (OEA).  As you know, two categories of OEA videos exist and are accessible from Progress Communities, Getting Starting with OEA and Using OEA. John has added videos to the Using OEA category. Additionally, John has introduced a new category, Using Visual Designer and GUI for .NET, and has provided no less than 12 supporting videos. See John’s article for information about all of these videos and how to use them with other supporting intellectual property.

Next up is Melissa Spurr, Senior Course Developer, who tells you about a significant update to the Apama® Fundamentals workshop. This course, which targets developers new to Apama, shows you how to build a basic Capital Markets application using Apama. Read Melissa’s article for a description of all the workshop components and sign up for this course.

Mike Linnehan, Sr. Manager for Documentation, follows with a description of new Task Maps for OpenEdge® Architect and OpenEdge GUI for .NET.  Targeting common tasks that a developer/customer would undertake in using OEA, e.g., the maps provide you with a path through the supporting IP set—documentation, courseware, online help, Tour, etc.—so that you can more quickly locate what you need. See Mike’s descriptions and follow his links to your new task maps, and don’t forget to provide us with feedback on the effectiveness of these maps.

Bryan Davis, Principal Editor, serves up an article about the most recent accolades garnered by the Knowledge Services team at Progress Software. This year the Society for Technical Communication (STC), Boston Chapter, has bestowed 11 awards upon us for our courseware and technical documentation, including five Distinguished awards (highest level). The importance of these awards is that they provide an objective validation by a reputable third-party of the high quality of our deliverables. It’s a credential we’re very proud of and that should reassure you, our customers.

Finally, James Willis, Principal Course Developer, authors a brief article about new training materials to help any of you who are interested in migrating to the OpenEdge® Architect. Allow James to lead you to the proper site on Progress Communities where you can access these valuable entities.

- Don Fournier

Educational Videos on Visual Designer and GUI for .NET Now Available

By John Sadd

Two series of brief, recorded videos on Getting Started with OpenEdge® Architect and Using OpenEdge Architect have been available for some time on Progress Communities as part of the OpenEdge Product area of the PSDN Community. A new category has been added to the Using OpenEdge Architect topic area titled Support for Classes in Architect, with two new sessions:

• Navigating Classes in Architect Using the ABL Editor, which shows Editor features such as hyperlinking and completion assistance and how they apply to editing ABL classes.
• Navigating Classes in Architect Using the Class Browser, which introduces the Architect Class Browser as a way to see a summary of all of a class’s methods, properties, and events.

In addition, there is a major new topic area titled Using Visual Designer and GUI for .NET in OpenEdge Architect. This area includes more than a dozen new video sessions covering topics related to the Visual Designer tool in Architect, and the latest OpenEdge support for building ABL applications with modern and feature-rich user interfaces that use .NET controls. The series also touches on a number of the language enhancements in ABL to support development in classes, as well as how to use Architect support for creating new class files, forms, interfaces, and other source code elements of a class-based application, all of which can be fully integrated with existing ABL procedural application components.

The new videos are organized into two groups. The first, Introducing Visual Designer and GUI for .NET, provides Getting Started material on using Visual Designer to create new user interfaces built with .NET controls, as well as the basic features of OpenEdge GUI for .NET support. This includes creating and using a ProBindingSource, attaching a ProBindingSource to a .NET grid control, building an Inherited Control and a User Control as specializations of built-in controls, creating your own Custom Controls group for use in Visual Designer, and subscribing to .NET events.

The second group of new videos is titled Using the OpenEdge ProBindingSource. The ProBindingSource is an OpenEdge-specific .NET control that serves as a DataSource for any .NET user interface control that displays data, whether from Microsoft, Infragistics, or other third-party vendors. It also connects to any query, ProDataSet, or temp-table in your ABL application code to help manage your data and coordinate data display and update with the user interface. These sessions go beyond the Introducing Visual Designer series to examine the use of all of the most important ProBindingSource properties, events, and methods, which support reading, sorting, and batching data from a data source, as well as all update operations.

The initial release of materials in this area includes a video showing ways to create a ProBindingSource directly from an ABL source file that contains a temp-table, ProDataSet, or XSD data definition, as well as from your database schema. Also available is a multi-part series on sorting data that shows how the ProBindingSource helps you manage data sorting, and how the Microsoft grid and Infragistics UltraGrid controls differ in how they coordinate with the ProBindingSource to manage sorting.

Additional videos on topics related to data batching and managing updates with the ProBindingSource, as well as other topic areas in OpenEdge Architect and OpenEdge 10.2, will be added to the site during 2010.

Each video is brief – typically seven to ten minutes – and covers a focused topic so that you can learn enough to try out what you’ve seen with your own application code. The videos don’t constitute a tutorial as such, so you can view them in any order that’s appropriate to you, depending on what you already know about using Architect and OpenEdge 10.2. That said, some of the videos work as a series to explore a larger topic, and some make use of application components built and explained in earlier videos. The overview page that links to all the videos on PSDN makes it clear in what order you should go through them if you want to see all the available material.

In addition, many of the videos have an accompanying document that provides a written version of the material, allowing you to examine in more detail the steps shown in the video and any code samples.

There’s no larger exercise or sample code base that you have to download and work with. Once you have seen what a video covers, you can take that knowledge back to apply it to your own application.

The videos are complementary to other materials you can access through the Evaluation Center link on the same OpenEdge product page, including the OpenEdge Tour, a series of high-level video presentations introducing the major feature areas of OpenEdge 10, including Architect; and the Architect Tutorial, a hands-on step-by-step tour of the Architect development environment using a sample application. There is also more detailed documentation available in the Architect Online Help, and in the manual OpenEdge Development: GUI for .NET Programming, also available on PSDN.

John Sadd is a Progress Engineering Fellow and OpenEdge Evangelist with Progress Software

Updated Courseware: Apama® Fundamentals

By Melissa Spurr

The Apama® Fundamentals instructor-led training course materials have been updated for Apama 4.2. Designed primarily for an audience of software developers who are new to Apama, this three-day workshop is centered around building a simple Capital Markets application.

 Apama Fundamentals is an intensive workshop consisting of interactive discussions, live demos, and hands-on exercises. In addition to sample application files, students receive handouts of the slide presentations and detailed lab exercise notes.

The following is a summary of the topics covered during the Apama Fundamentals workshop:

Day 1

• Introduction to Apama and the sample application
• Setting up your Apama Studio development environment
• Writing an Apama application using MonitorScript – the Apama event processing language       

Day 2

• Creating an Apama scenario program with the graphical Event Modeler tool
• Creating MonitorScript blocks and implementing them in a scenario program
• Building and deploying a dashboard – a user-interface for an Apama application

Day 3

• Overview of Apama’s data integration options
• Configuring the Integration Adapter Framework (IAF)
• Implementing a standard file adapter

The Apama Fundamentals instructor-led training course is delivered by Apama professional  services. Contact the Apama consulting services manager in your area to schedule a training session.

Coming Soon – Web-based Training for Apama

Targeted for delivery in 2010, we are planning to provide self-paced training materials for Apama, which will be available through the Progress eLearning Community at: https://wbt.progress.com.

Melissa Spurr is a Senior Course Developer with Progress Software.

New Documentation Task Maps added to the OpenEdge 10.2B Documentation

By Michael Linnehan

The OpenEdge® documentation team recently produced Documentation Task Maps to support the OpenEdge 10.2B release that shipped in December, 2009.  These task maps are online documents that list key tasks associated with an OpenEdge product or component that have been identified by Progress and Progress customers.  Each task is listed with one or more links to sources of information for getting started with and completing the task.  This information includes specific sections of documentation, online help, Exchange presentations, video tutorials, the OpenEdge Product Tour, eLearning courses, and other documents that customers can access from the Progress Communities with a single mouse click.  Using these maps, customers can find the critical information they need quickly and easily in one central location, eliminating the need to search all sources of documentation and training to find it. 

The initial task maps with this release include the OpenEdge Architect Task Map and the OpenEdge GUI for .NET Task Map.

Customers can access these task maps with Web access from their installed online OpenEdge Release 10.2B Documentation and Samples start page or the OpenEdge Product Documentation Overview page directly on the Progress Communities Web site.

The task map pages themselves are hosted on the Progress Communities which means that as new tasks and sources of information are identified, they can be added or updated in the appropriate map and made immediately available to members and visitors to the Progress Communities, who will be notified for each update.  Task maps for additional OpenEdge products and components will also be added as they become available, and customers will be able to access them as conveniently as the maps.

Michael Linnehan is the Senior Manager of Knowledge Services’ Documentation group at Progress Software.

Progress rakes in awards at annual competitions

By Bryan Davis

As the colder weather settles here in New England once again, those of us in the Education and Documentation divisions of Progress Software begin to focus on another annual event – the STC-Boston’s Online Communication and Technical Publications competitions in which companies from the six New England states submit their work and vie for the competitions’ top honors.

This year, Progress added 11 more awards to its coffers with an unprecedented  five Distinguished-level awards (the highest honor) between the two competitions, representing a wide range of Progress products:

Online Communications Competition

• SonicMQ® System Administration  - Distinguished
• Using Web Services in Sonic Applications –  Distinguished
• Using Actional® to Monitor and Manage Sonic – Distinguished
• Service Management with Actional Intermediary – Distinguished
• Active Policy Enforcement with Actional – Excellence
• Accessing Databases – Excellence
• OpenEdge® Architect Visual Designer –Excellence
• Defining Workspace Database Connections  – Merit

Technical Publications Competition

• 10.2A OpenEdge Getting Started: Introducing the OpenEdge Architect Visual Designer (Documentation) – Distinguished
• Progress SonicMQ System Administration – Excellence
• Using Actional to Monitor and Manage Sonic – Merit

Progress annually enters two of the STC’s competitions – Online Communications and Technical Publications – in which awards are given in three tiers: Distinguished, Excellence and Merit. This year’s Distinguished awards are particularly gratifying given the STC-Boston competitions’ reputation as one of the toughest competitions in the Society nationally.

“Once again Progress is very honored to be recognized by our peers like this,” said Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services at Progress Software. “But it doesn’t mean we can sit back and expect to win every year. Winning these awards only drives us to set the bar higher for ourselves and improve our training and documentation for those who use Progress products.”

This year’s Progress awardees included a first in some time for the Documentation group and a Distinguished-level award will hopefully be the first of many more in the future, said Michael Linnehan, Senior Manager of Knowledge Services’ Documentation group.

“This award has reinforced what we have always believed – that we produce excellent documentation in support our products,” said Linnehan. “Progress continues to release great products for its customers and we are proud to help users get the most out of those products.”

The Best of Show award in the Online Communication and Technical Publications competitions will be announced at the STC-Boston Chapter’s annual dinner in February.  Also, all entries receiving a Distinguished-level award will compete in their respective STC International competitions, to be held in March.

With the latest round of honors, Progress has won a total of 50 awards and three Best of Show awards between the local and International competitions since 2002.

The STC organization is dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication and is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 14,000+ members include technical writers, editors, graphic designers, multimedia artists, Web and intranet page information designers, translators and others whose work involves making technical information understandable and available to those who need it.

It is those members with such a diverse background and areas of expertise that serve as judges in the competition.

For information on Progress’ web-based training, please visit: http://wbt.progress.com

To learn more about Progress Education offerings, please visit: http://www.progress.com/services/education/index.ssp

Bryan Davis is the Principal Editor of Knowledge Services at Progress Software

Easing Architect Migration

By James Willis

OpenEdge® Architect provides many capabilities to meet the diverse development needs of our customers.  To those who have little experience with the product, integrating it into their development process can be complicated due to those vast capabilities and options.  Issues include moving to a new project-based development environment, integrating with existing Source Code Management (SCM) tools, extending the environment to meet specific development needs, and setting up and deploying the environment to developers. 

To ease the migration process to Architect, Progress Education has recently released a set of public materials that will assist customers in solving adoption issues.  The Integrating and Extending Architect training materials offer insight into how to traverse the many capabilities of Architect, including:

• Setting up and configuring the environment.
• Migrating existing applications to the environment.
• Developing an implementation process plan.
• Creating new or customizing existing Architect templates to meet an organization’s needs.
• Adding custom built ABL utilities to Architect's menus and toolbars.
• Using Architect Events to launch ABL utilities.
• Extending Architect using Plug-ins.

In addition, the materials cover how to integrate Architect with other tools in your existing Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).  Examples include integrating Architect with Tugboat Software’s Roundtable products and Progress’s Sonic Workbench product.

These free training materials can be found on the Progress Communities website at: http://communities.progress.com/pcom/community/psdn/openedge/architect/education

James Willis is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software

PLEASE NOTE:

• Courses highlighted in blue need to be deleted.
• Courses highlighted in yellow need to be added or changed.

Curriculum At-a-Glance

Progress, Actional, Apama, AppBuilder, AppServer, DataXtend, FUSE, WebClient, Progress Dynamics, SmartObject, OpenEdge, Sonic, SonicMQ, Sonic ESB, Sonic Orchestration Server, ProDataSets, and WebSpeed are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one it its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

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