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Newsletter Archive - May 2010

Table of Contents

1. Welcome, from Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier
2. OpenEdge Curriculum Course Updates, by Dan Rose, Douglas Adams and Patrick McCormack
3. New Course Available: Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment, by Kashif Kahn
4. New Course Available: Using Sonic Deployment Manager to Deploy Sonic, by Arjun Sengupta
5. Educational Videos on using the ProBindingSource with GUI for .NET Now Available, by John Sadd
6. New eLearning Course Evaluations, by Craig VanDerAa
7. Progress Wins Fifth Best of Show Training Award, by Bryan Davis

Welcome from Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services

This Spring edition of the Education Newsletter, like sprouting foliage, bears signs for you of new life in the OpenEdge and Sonic curricula.

First, a trio of our content developers – Dan Rose, Doug Adams, and Pat McCormack – have worked to provide significant updates to two critical courses: Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Using ProDataSets. Read their descriptions of changes to this courseware and turn to the Progress eLearning Community (PEC) for your updates. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the PEC, talk to your PSC Sales representative who can explain the enormous value the PEC can bring to your workplace.

John Sadd, a PSC Fellow and OpenEdge Evangelist, continues to add to our collection of OE Architect videos. These compelling creations give you brief, focused, practical insights into how you might best exploit a new feature or component. John also tells you how to use the videos with other PSC intellectual property accessible at Progress Communities, within the product, or in other ways.

Two new Sonic courses, Progress Sonic ESB Deployment and Using Sonic Deployment Manager to Deploy Sonic, are described by their developers, Kashif Khan and Arjun Sengupta, Principal and Senior Instructional Designers at our Hyderabad, India facility. The Sonic Deployment Manager (SDM) is a great new tool aimed at application developers and deployment managers who have to “deploy Sonic apps and components over a large number of distributed host systems.” Read about the benefits of SDM and how to implement it. Read also about how to deploy an ESB app in a SonicMQ environment, a seemingly challenging task.

Continuously seeking to improve our Education infrastructure to better help you, our customers, we have launched a new eLearning course evaluation form available from the PEC with new courses. See the announcement by Craig VanDerAa, a Principal eLearning Developer. Know that we will consider all of your comments as we address new iterations of courses.

Bryan Davis, our Principal Editor, announces an unusual award garnered by PSC Knowledge Services this year. Annually, we receive multiple awards from the Society of Technical Communication for our Education and Documentation products, including four Best Of Show (BOS) Awards. This year’s BOS, our fifth, was unique, however, and was a source of great pride for us. See Bryan’s article.

Thank you for your business. Please continue to let us know how we can improve serving you through our Education portfolio.

 -Don Fournier

OpenEdge Curriculum Course Updates

By Dan Rose, Douglas Adams and Patrick McCormack

Two key courses in the OpenEdge curriculum have been updated for the OpenEdge 10.2B product – Introduction to Object-oriented Programming and Using ProDataSets. These valuable updates allow students to learn even more about the robust set of features in the latest OpenEdge product.

Introduction to Object-oriented Programming

The Introduction to Object-oriented Programming course (ABL) update helps fill in the feature gap between OpenEdge Releases 10.1 and 10.2B.  In the process, some new examples and lab materials have been added and updated to include new features, such as garbage collection.  A number of conceptual, textual, and coding updates also were made in both the lessons and sample application, and many new class files were added to illustrate new features without changing the underlying functionality of the sample application or the basic lesson plan.

In addition to ABL features like garbage collection, the course coverage has been updated to include the following:

• events as class members
• new class instantiation features
• property and event prototypes in interface definitions
• abstract classes
• static class members
• class namespaces and resolving naming conflicts
• ABL arrays as properties and method return values
• the use of THIS-OBJECT as both a system reference and statement, and,
• a brief overview of the new class reflection and other ABL elements available to support dynamic programming with classes.

Also, more comparisons were added between the object-oriented and procedural programming features of ABL, as well as additional details such as the need to use an initial procedure to instantiate the first class in an ABL application. Known issues with labs and exercises in the first version of the course also were corrected.

Using ProDataSets

Intended primarily for application developers who design and build modern, distributed applications, the Using ProDataSets course guides students through the design and development process using Progress Software’s powerful Progress DataSets (ProDataSets) data object.

Most notably, this course has been updated in support of recursive Data-Relations, inactive Data-Relations, new Data-Source attributes, and new options for XML serialization.

The course includes the following lessons:

Dan Rose is a Principal Technical Writer and Douglas Adams and Patrick McCormack are Senior Technical Writers for Progress Software Corporation

New Course Available: Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment

By Kashif Kahn

Deploying an ESB application in the SonicMQ messaging environment is an important but complex task that spans two different Sonic environments:

• The ESB application development environment where developers build ESB applications
• The MQ messaging environment where SonicMQ administrators configure and deploy

The process involves extracting existing ESB applications from one environment and deploying them in distributed, secure, scalable, and highly available Sonic ESB systems in another environment.

Course overview

The Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment course covers the concepts, procedures, tools, and best practices used in extracting composite applications from a development environment and deploying them on the ESB in user-acceptance testing and production environments.

The course includes the following six lessons:

The Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment course is build on Sonic 8.0 and is primarily designed for ESB administrators who are responsible for deploying applications across environments.

Course delivery format

This course is available as online learning with a subscription to the Progress eLearning Community. The course also will be available as two-day Instructor-led Training (ILT) later this spring.

Coming soon

The Progress Sonic ESB System Management course which covers managing, monitoring and tuning Sonic ESB applications will be available in late Spring. This course is also targeted at ESB administrator andfollows the Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment course in the course map for ESB administrators.

Kashif Kahn is a Principal Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation

New Course Available: Using Sonic Deployment Manager to Deploy Sonic

By Arjun Sengupta

Organizations worldwide use Progress® SonicMQ® and Progress® Sonic® ESB to implement Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions that address two broad business needs – robust messaging and enterprise integration. However, building a production environment consisting of thousands of SonicMQ and Sonic ESB components distributed across organizational and geographic boundaries can be a daunting task. This is where Sonic Deployment Manager (SDM) steps in. Sonic Deployment Manager automates the deployment process and streamlines the migration of ESB artifacts by using a model-driven architecture.

SDM has two primary use-cases:

• In the development lifecycle, where Sonic ESB applications are built in a development environment and deployed along with the underlying SonicMQ infrastructure to user-acceptance and production environments.
• In large-scale rollouts, where the Sonic infrastructure has to be deployed over tens, hundreds, or even thousands of host systems.

The course Using Sonic Deployment Manager to Deploy Sonic introduces Sonic Deployment Manager and demonstrates how to use an SDM model in both use-cases. The course is aimed at application developers seeking to use SDM to streamline their Sonic development lifecycle, and at deployment managers seeking to use Sonic Deployment Manager to deploy Sonic applications and Sonic components over a large number of distributed host systems.

The course comprises four lessons:

Course delivery formats

This course is available as online learning with a subscription to the Progress eLearning Community. It is also available as a two-day Instructor-led Training. You may request an instructor-led training class taught by a Progress Sonic consultant at your own location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information. For more information on the Progress eLearning Community, please visit: http://wbt.progress.com.

Arjun Sengupta is a Senior Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation

Educational Videos on using the ProBindingSource with GUI for .NET Now Available

By John Sadd

Three series of videos on Getting Started with OpenEdge Architect, Using OpenEdge Architect and Using Visual Designer and GUI for .NET have been available on Progress Communities as part of the OpenEdge Product area of the PSDN Community.

Five new videos have been added to the GUI for .NET topic group 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. At the same time it, 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. The sessions already available introduce the use of the most important ProBindingSource properties, events, and methods to support reading, displaying and sorting data.

The new series covers additional properties and events that support updates to data, creating new records, and deleting records through the ProBindingSource, as well as an introduction to data batching with the binding source.

Each video is brief – typically seven to 12 minutes – and covers a focused topic so that you can immediately use what you just learned in your own application code. Because the videos are not necessarily a tutorial, you can view them in any order you would like, depending on what you already know about using Architect and OpenEdge 10.2. Note that 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 pages are linked to the videos on a particular topic (accessible from the main OpenEdge product page on PSDN) help clarify the order best used to view the videos if you want to view all the available material.

In addition, many of the videos include a helpful document that provides a written version of the material, thus allowing you to examine in greater detail the steps shown in the video and any code samples.

Also, there is 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 complement 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, 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 information available in the Architect Online Help; in the manual OpenEdge Development: GUI for .NET Programming, part of the OpenEdge 10.2B product documentation; and in various recorded webinars available through the Developers Corner link, all accessible from the OpenEdge Product home page on PSDN at Progress Communities.

John Sadd is a Progress Engineering Fellow and OpenEdge Evangelist at Progress Software Corporation

New eLearning Course Evaluations

By Craig VanDerAa

In a continuing effort to always improve our web-based training courses, Progress Software is pleased to announce that all new eLearning courses on the Progress eLearning Community will include a course evaluation form. Our goal is to collect your feedback – what worked, what did not, and why – in order to make future courses even better.

The course evaluation form (pictured below) consists of 21 questions designed to gather your comments and suggestions on a variety of topics – ranging from applicability of the material and ease of navigation, to helpfulness of the Try It exercises and animations. We also ask for suggestions on ways that we could improve the course, as well as any other new course titles that you would like to see added to the Progress eLearning Community.

The first course to offer the new evaluation form is our latest Sonic course offering, Using Sonic Deployment Manager to Deploy Sonic. The data collected is anonymous, so you can be completely honest and tell us what you really think. However, if you do want us to follow up with you, just bypass the form and contact us directly at wbt-core@progress.com.

Craig VanDerAa is a Principal eLearning Developer with Progress Software Corporation

Progress Wins Fifth Best of Show Training Award

By Bryan Davis

Citing the “overall excellence and quality” of Progress Software’s award-winning web-based training, the Boston Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication bestowed an unprecedented Best of Show award not for a single entry, but for all of Progress’ entries into this year’s Online Communication Competition.

Earlier this year, Progress took home 11 awards between the Society’s Technical Publications and Online Communication competitions. The Best of Show award was announced at the STC’s annual dinner in February.

This latest, highly coveted Best of Show honor is Progress’ fifth such award in eight years of entering the competitions.

“We are very grateful for this extraordinary type of Best of Show award from the Society,” said Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services at Progress Software. “While winning (the highest-level) Distinction awards for our training is very satisfying, a unique overall Best of Show award like this is a true testament to the hard work and dedication of those at Progress who develop our training in support of our customers.”

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

Photo caption:

Knowledge Services Principal Editor and STC member Bryan Davis accepts the Best of Show award on behalf of Progress Software.

Photo credit: Karen Lippencott

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

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.

Copyright © 2010 Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

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