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Month: February 2017

Working with Files: FolderItem

Sooner or later your app will need to work with files, maybe to save the data generated with the app itself, to open the files created with other apps or because is the main purpose of the utility you are working on. Xojo gives you the class FolderItem fully loaded with a useful bunch of properties that allow you to examine the attributes of any file; for example, the creation or modification of dates, the file path (in several formats), if the file is an alias, etc. The FolderItem class also gives you the methods to do a lot of file operations without effort.

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Do you still ASCII?

From time to time we get code that illustrates a problem a user is having when they rely on old-school ASCII. This problem can occur when using the Chr function to create a character.

One example we see reasonably frequently is code to create a string that contains a quote like:

 dim someString as String = chr(34) + "someValue" + chr(34)

This style is not necessary and may give unwanted results if you have an unusual string encoding. Instead, you can write this without the use of the Chr function. Here’s how:

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Fractional Scale Factors

With all the Retina/HiDPI work done in the past few years, we’ve had to add some new features along with it. One of these newer features is the Graphics ScaleX and ScaleY properties.  For the purposes of Retina/HiDPI, the scale factor is used when converting user space coordinates to backing store coordinates.  While mostly integral on MacOS (unless originating from some code that’s probably not ours), it can vary on Windows, and perhaps arguably mostly fractional.  This is because Windows allows you to set DPI scales at 125%, 150%, etc. So when dealing with fractional scales there are a few things to watch out for:

  1. Rounding issues
  2. Anti-alias effect

While the framework takes care of rounding issues, for the most part, the secondary issue of anti-aliasing is up to you.

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Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

From a recent Ars Technical article called “The future of Microsoft’s languages“, emphasis mine:

In spite of its name, the current Visual Basic is not the same language as the ancient Visual Basic 6, nor the Visual Basic for Applications used for macroing. The transition to .NET in 2002, with what was called, at the time, Visual Basic.NET, left developers familiar with those languages high and dry; although the new language was called Visual Basic, and looked a bit like Visual Basic, it was really just C# in disguise. There was no good migration path from old to new, and much of the simplicity of those older languages was forfeit.

This is a primary reason why so many Visual Basic developers choose Xojo after trying Microsoft Visual Basic (.NET): they don’t want “C# in disguise”.

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TextField: Getting the User Input

Xojo is a modern, powerful programming language with an IDE that simplifies all kind of tasks related your project creation and deployment. One such helpful feature is the UI layout design; you can find it under the Library Panel, it’s a meaningful collection of graphic classes (Controls) ready to use in our apps. Probably one of the first and most used controls in apps design is the TextField, TextField simplifies the way an app can get the input from the user. Let’s see its main properties and how this control behaves when used in Desktop, Web (WebTextField) and iOS (iOSTextField) apps!

You can watch the video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) as you read and work through this post.

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What is Xojo?

2017’s first “What is Xojo?” webinar was well received and there were lots of questions. Rather than include the questions in the video, I’ve included a…

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