John Strano explains how PowerBuilder 11 deploys entire applications as .NET Windows Form or Web Form applications and deploys individual components as .NET Assemblies and as .NET Web Services. Version 11 consumes resources of the default .NET framework as well as resources of custom developer-defined .NET resources. Non-PowerBuilder .NET solutions can interoperate with, and take advantage of, the unparalleled productivity of PowerBuilder’s data access and data manipulation capabilities. In short, PowerBuilder 11 creates as well as consumes .NET resources.

Once PowerBuilder 11 has deployed an application or a component as .NET, the developer can begin taking advantage of external .NET resources on a scripted basis through PowerScript enhancements. The scripted .NET interoperability in PowerBuilder 11 is predicated on a new conditional compilation feature. Conditional compilation allows declarations, references and calls, etc. that are meant for .NET interop to be declared within preprocessor blocks of code. These preprocessor blocks are constructs similar to IF statements. If the developer specifies that these #IF/THEN/#ELSE/#ELSEIF blocks are only for .NET runtime execution, they’re ignored by PowerBuilder’s Win32 compiler.

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