Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
Posts related to Windows-specific development.
After seeing this conversation on the forums, I thought it would be helpful to run through why you can move some of your app’s DLLs but you cannot move others.
On Windows, the Visual Studio C Runtime DLLs can be in one of two locations on systems that do not already have them installed. All versions of Windows prior to Windows 10 would need these installed.
Comments closedYou can call into Win32 APIs (aka WinAPI) to use methods and properties that are not built into the framework by using the Declare command. To create a Declare statement you first need to track down the API you want to use using Microsoft’s documentation: Microsoft Developer Documentation.
Comments closedHere are some tips that will help ensure your Windows apps look and feel their best, with Xojo 2018 Release 1 now that Windows apps now have a more stable and flicker-free UI than ever before.
1 CommentViruses continue to be a big problem on Windows. As a result, anti-virus software can be a bit over-zealous about detecting what it believes to be apps that have viruses embedded within them. We have had reports over the years that apps made with Xojo are sometimes falsely identified as being infected with a virus. This sometimes occurs because the 32-bit Xojo compiler puts executable code in a location where the anti-virus software doesn’t expect to find it. We’ve seen this occur even when users are debugging apps from the IDE. Fortunately in that case, there’s a fairly easy solution.
Comments closedMany years ago, the Window Functionality Suite (WFS) library was created by Aaron Ballman. This library was a collection of Win32 Declares (and a few other things) for accessing Windows-specific functionality that was not directly provided by the Xojo framework.
WFS is still available on GitHub, but it has languished over the years. For example, it has lots of legacy code in it for older versions of Windows that is no longer needed since Xojo only supports Windows 7 and later. WFS is also not really compatible with 64-bit projects since the Declares mostly assume 32-bit or bust.
To that end, I’ve started a new open-source project called WinAPILib that is now available on GitHub.
Comments closedThe latest XojoTalk Podcast – Paul talks with Wayne Golding of Axis Direct about how his company uses Xojo, Xojo 2017 Release 2, New Zealand and more.
Comments closedIn his poem, “The Mouse”, Robert Burns wrote:
The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray…
As Burns so eloquently stated, no matter how carefully you plan sometimes things just don’t work out. Anyone who has done software development for long knows this all too well.
Comments closedI love listening to music and have been a happy Apple Music subscriber since it was first released in 2015. Having access to 30 million songs is great even if I mostly just listen to the ones in the “Hard Rock” category (current favorite song: You Don’t Know by Kobra and the Lotus). Unlike some other streaming services, when you listen to a song with iTunes that has not been downloaded to your computer, it does not technically stream it while it’s playing. Instead iTunes downloads the full song to a cache folder and plays it locally from there. This has the advantage of there being fewer stutters as the song is playing, but does mean it takes a moment before the song starts playing the first time. Subsequent plays of the same song are instant, though, since it doesn’t have to download it again which may also save you some Internet data usage. A notable downside to this design is that it also means that these songs are using up space on your drive and with today’s smaller SSDs often every bit of space counts. It doesn’t appear that this space is ever cleared by iTunes, either.
These songs files are saved in a cache folder buried in hidden folders on macOS and Windows, which you can get to manually if you are comfortable with the command line.
Alternatively, you can easily make a quick Xojo app to do it for you.
Comments closedRecently, a new syndication format was introduced by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece called JSON Feed. It is an alternative to RSS/Atom to get feeds for blog posts and podcasts. RSS/Atom are XML-based making them complex to work with. As its name implies JSON Feed uses JSON and is much simpler. I’ve shown in previous posts how easy it is to make a web and iOS apps with Xojo to display the feed.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Xojo desktop app to display the JSON feed for Daring Fireball in less than 20 lines of code. This app works without changes on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Comments closedIf you are a Mac or Linux web or cross-platform developer, one of the easiest ways to test your apps on Windows is to use a virtual machine. And you can test Windows in a VM completely for free by using the test VMs provided by Microsoft.
Comments closed