[3] In 2019 support was added for rapidly creating RESTful Web APIs and non-visual .NET assemblies using the C# language and the .NET Core framework.

[5] PowerBuilder has a native data-handling object called a DataWindow, which can be used to create, edit, and display data from a database.

This object gives the programmer a number of tools for specifying and controlling user interface appearance and behavior, and also provides simplified access to database content and JSON or XML from Web services.

Although new software products are rarely built with PowerBuilder, many client-server ERP products and line-of-business applications built in the late 1980s to early 2000s with PowerBuilder still provide core database functions for large enterprises in government,[6][7][8] higher education,[9] manufacturing, insurance, banking,[10] energy, and telecommunications.

It provides a new C# IDE, .NET data access objects, C# migration solution, Web API client, and UI themes.

This release includes a first-ever PowerScript-to-C# code converter, which can automatically migrate 80-95% of PowerBuilder business logic and DataWindows to C#.

C# Web API development has been greatly enhanced with asynchronous programming and support for Amazon Aurora and Azure cloud databases.

It includes many other new features, which Appeon claims makes PowerBuilder one of the easiest and most productive tools for developing Installable Cloud Apps.

It includes many new features, including Windows 11 support, introducing time-saving functionalities to the IDE, such as Tabbed Code Editor, Jump to Objects, and Quick Code Search, and supports the latest HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3 protocols and two-way TLS authentication.

This release introduces a range of new features aimed at helping developers build powerful, feature-rich, and secure client/server and installable cloud apps more efficiently, including tabbed windows, fillable PDFs, and SMTP client.

The DataWindow offers a visual SQL painter which supports outer joins, unions and subquery operations.

DataWindow updates are automatic — it produces the proper SQL at runtime based on the DBMS to which the user is currently connected.

The RESTClient object introduced in PowerBuilder 2017 facilitates bridging the DataWindow with REST Web APIs and requiring minimal coding.

[21] PowerBuilder offers native interfaces to all major databases, as well as ODBC and OLE-DB, in the Enterprise version.

PowerBuilder supports the following ways of interacting with a database: DataWindow: this is the simplest approach, relying on automatically generated SQL.

It also has built-in performance profiling, an integrated debugger, context-sensitive help, and an active newsgroup to provide support.