Mike Fechner

Director and Lead Modernization Architect, Consultingwerk

Mike Fechner, director and lead modernization architect at Consultingwerk started using Progress over 30 years ago and ever since has supported Progress Application Partners and end customers in adopting the features of the latest OpenEdge and Progress releases to enhance the capabilities of existing applications.

With his framework design skills he has set the stage for development of many successful OpenEdge applications.

Mike is specialized on object orientation in the ABL, software architectures, the GUI for .NET, web technologies and a wide range of Progress products such as OpenEdge, Telerik and Corticon.

He is involved in software modernization projects on a day by day basis. He is a well-known and active member of the international OpenEdge community, frequent presenter at conferences around the world and is a board member of the German PUG and founder of the committee of the EMEA PUG Challenge. He’s also a founding member of the Common Component Specification project.

Speaker Sessions

ABL legacy code refactoring – patterns and strategies

Looking at that old GUI or Character application you’ve been working on in the last decades? Wondering what you can do with it to migrate it to the web or modern desktop UI? Business Logic mixed in UI triggers? Validation sprinkled with user interaction?

Using .NET core with OpenEdge

In this presentation Mike Fechner introduces the ability to use .NET Core from OpenEdge – a new feature released with OpenEdge 12.7. The presentations provides and overview of .NET Core and how it differentiates from previous .NET Integrations in OpenEdge.

Speaker Workshops

Great power and great responsibility: writing web handlers

Web handlers have been available in PASOE since 11.6.0 and are an easy – for the ABL programmer – way of adding a REST API to an application. Web handlers give programmers many options, but they also require that the ABL code deal with most aspects of the request and response, including conversion from “HTTP” to “ABL” (or even “4GL” if you’re that way inclined) and back again. An application may have one web handler per business service, or just one for the application, or something in between.

This workshop discusses how to decide on approaches for how many web handlers your application needs, how to write a web handler – covering content types, strategies for error handling and status codes, routing requests and more – and also covers topics like deployment and authorization.

Using the ABL HTTP client for fun & profit

Most applications integrate with external systems, internal and external to the business. More and more of these use HTTP rather than something like SOAP to communicate. The ABL’s HTTP client has been available since OpenEdge release 11.5 and provides an easy way to make requests to these systems using standard HTTP.
This workshop will give attendees an understanding of how to use the HTTP client for a variety of requests, using various standard data types such as JSON and XML, but also more exotic types like multipart or MTOM messages.
It will show attendees how to build and make requests and how to process the responses.
The workshop will also focus on making secure requests, at an API level (using login credentials, cookies and/or headers) as well at the network level using TLS/HTTPS.
Troubleshooting and customizing the HTTP client will also be covered.