Upgrade 

How difficult would PB 9.0 to R3 migration be?

Other than Unicode and assuming you are not heavily relying on a discontinued feature then it should not be very difficult.  There is a Migration Guide to assist you with identifying key issues to consider: /support/documents/appeon_online_help/pb2017r3/migrating_pb_apps/index.html.

Are there new PFC's available

PFC was released to open source back in the PowerBuilder 10 days.  The latest version can be found at https://github.com/OpenSourcePFCLibraries​

Will C# come for standard PB (client/server on windows) too?

C# development is a feature in the Cloud Edition of PowerBuilder for developing cloud apps.

SVN & Git

Is SVN open source?

Yes, both SVN and Git are open source.

Does R3 allow for source control integration with SVN or GIT without the need for a third party bridge?

Yes.  That was introduced in R2, but there are enhancements in R3.  You will still need to use TortoiseSVN/TortoiseGit to do show log and them or another tool for show diff.

Regarding the PBG files - are these not needed for all Source Control Providers now or is it just for GIT?

PBG is still available when you use the legacy MSSCCI API.  Only when interfacing with Git and SVN there are no more PBGs.  

Are there steps available to convert existing proxy-SVN based repository to the new style and keep the history?

No, and we wouldn't recommend it.  We suggest creating a new repository and keeping the old one available for historical purposes.  Here is a real customer case.  They migrated from PVCS to SVN and they did a lot of work to migrate over the history, and then they rarely if ever made any use of it.

If we are using TFS with Git, can the branching and merging be done there, or do we still need a tortoise product?

Yes, you would need the Tortoise client for the advanced features like branching and merging.

REST & JSON

Is the memory consumption much better with JSON than Get/Set FullState?

Yes, due to design differences it should be much better.  But we don't have benchmarks to provide you.

We use GetFullState to get the Blob and then save it to the file system in a compressed format. This acts like a 'security' feature because the Blob is useless without the DataWindow. With JSON is there a way to get the same result when saving to the file system?

This feature can hardly be implemented because PowerBuilder is still single-threaded.  We've recorded this as an enhancement request and keep looking for a possible solution.  However, you can use the timeout settings to ensure a REST request gets cancelled if the server is not responding.

Can Appeon add a feature to stop/cancel REST request?

Yes, both SVN and Git are open source.

Will it be possible to have the datawindow formatting specs exported as part of JSON export functionality in current or future release?

We do not have the plan to export DW formatting specs as part of JSON export functionality yet.  

If the REST service response is in XML, is there something that will convert the data to JSON?

There are two possible ways: (1)You may either use a third party tool/solution to convert the XML to JSON, or  (2) first use PBDOM to parse the XML, and then use the JSONGenerator provided in PB 2017 R3 to generate JSON.

With the old SetFullState method, you didn't need the actual datawindow on the receiving side. You just call SetFullState in a blank datawindow and you'd get everything. Will this be the same with JSON?

This is the main difference between SetFullState and ImportJSON.  SetFullState can apply content to a DataWindow without DataWindow syntax; ImportJSON can only apply content to DataWindows that already have DataWindow creation syntax.