From WinDev to DSB: a mapping guide

If you have shipped WinDev applications, DevStudioBuilder will feel familiar in the right places and refreshingly different in the others. Nothing you know is wasted — the concepts map one to one.

Analyse → ERD

Your data-first discipline survives intact. The Analyse becomes a visual ERD: typed fields, relations, indexes. The difference is what comes out the other side — DSB generates standard SQL and versioned migrations, so schema changes are reviewable diffs instead of a binary file.

Fenêtres → UI Designer

Windows are still windows: real chrome, anchors for resizing, tab order, business fields ready to drop (tax IDs, bank details, barcodes, invoice lines). Field catalogs and inherited styles play the role your templates and window models did.

États → Reports

The banded report editor is deliberately close to what you know: bands, breaks, totals, from A4 invoices to 80 mm receipts. Reports bind to your entities, so a schema change flags the reports it affects.

WLangage → workflows + Go

This is the biggest mental shift. Business logic lives in visual workflows — executable graphs you can step through with breakpoints and live data. When you need real code, you write a script node in Go: a small, readable, statically-typed language. The generated application is Go through and through, so what you debug is what runs.

GDS → Git

Instead of a proprietary source manager, every DSB project is a plain Git repository. Branches, pull requests, visual diffs of windows and workflows, CI on GitHub or any host. Your team's review culture applies to low-code work at last.

Your HFSQL data comes along

The Pro plan imports HFSQL structures: your existing tables arrive as entities in the ERD, ready to refine. The data model you built over years is the most valuable part of your application — DSB treats it that way.

The honest summary: you keep your mental model, you gain standard code, standard SQL and standard Git — and you lose the runtime fees.