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qinghao-liang
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

Last Saturday Microsoft released the second major update of its Windows 10 Technical Preview for customer evaluation. Although this build won't have all the eye-catching features demonstrated in the Windows 10 event last week, the new browser Spartan is not there for example, it's still worth having a try. The size of 32-bit image file is about 3GB, while 64-bit image is more than 4GB, but it's only a piece of cake to download in today's network. To install Windows 10 Technical Preview on a new VMWare VM is also very easy and straight. The latest VMWare Workstation version 11 supports Windows 10 Tech Preview as a client OS, but I only have VMWare Workstation 9.0, so I chose Windows 8 instead, good luck! it worked and the installation went smoothly. It took me less than 30 minutes to complete all the installation and setup process.

I started exploring of the new Windows, clicking here and there, it's very easy to get familiar with the new environment and get start to use. After a while, I just couldn't wait to know how well PowerBuilder can run on this new OS.

Launch the PB12.6 GA installer, install PB.NET prerequisites then SQL Anywhere 16 and finally PowerBuilder. All ran smoothly, like doing on Windows 7. At the end of the installation, I chose not to restart Windows. Click the Start Menu, looking for entries for PowerBuilder IDE. It surprised me a little, you can see what I saw from the following screen shot. All executables installed by PB were arranged in a single level under the top level SAP folder, second and deeper levels are missing. This is worse than Windows 8, probably a limitation of Windows 10?

I clicked to run PB classic IDE, however it just hanged at the very first splash window, what a shock :shock: ! Realized that I didn't restart after the installation, I did a reboot of the VM.  Ran PB classic IDE the second time, Alla... it's OK now. Look at the caption bar of PB IDE in the below screen shot.

Then, ran the PB Examples application shipped with PowerBuilder, I executed a lot examples there, all worked perfectly. Here's a screen shot of graph drill-down example.

I tried PB.NET IDE and developed a WPF application finally, all worked very well.  I captured a screenshot of both PB.NET IDE and a running PB WPF application in the following picture. Note that window in the foreground is the PB WPF application.

To summarize, my first play with PowerBuilder 12.6 on the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview is very encouraging, I even think the performance is better than on Windows 7, especially for PB.NET IDE.  Though Windows 10 is still in the early stage today, I believe, running PowerBuilder on Windows 10 final release will be straight forward. :smile:

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