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Month: June 2015

Web App Security- It’s For More Than Just Your App

Web apps built with the traditional tools (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) are nothing more than a series of text files and thus not very secure. Once a hacker gets into a server, they can steal your code or modify it. One big advantage web apps built with Xojo have is that Xojo compiles your app to machine code so there’s no code on your server to steal. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of hackers have no experience with machine code, so modifying your app to do something nefarious can be extraordinarily difficult.

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Testing The Compiler

Over the course of the last year, there have been a huge number of changes to the Xojo compiler (just under 800 commits). We made large refactorings, like rewriting how unqualified name lookup works. We fixed around 35 bugs, some of them dating back years. We added major new features to the language, including ‘Using’, Iterators, and new data types. To top it all off, we shipped support for a completely new platform, iOS, and then met Apple’s deadline for building 64-bit iOS apps.

And after all of that, we ended up with around eight regressions in the compiler. While not the perfect zero, I think this is just as impressive as the changes themselves.

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Is the NSA going to get you to switch to DuckDuckGo?

Last October, I wrote a blog post about how vulnerable Google is in its search business (the overwhelming source of its revenue). I realized this vulnerability after discovering that another search engine, DuckDuckGo, was started for less than $10 million, has equivalent search results, a clean looking interface and a low cost of switching. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over 8 months now, I didn’t make the switch from Google for privacy reasons, I simply liked the cleaner interface, but I’ll be honest and say that the privacy it offers is something I appreciate. Apparently, I’m among a growing group of savvy searchers.

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Programming Resources For Students

Can I learn to code in Xojo for free? Yes, Xojo is free for development and testing!

Do you have a free book so I can learn to code? Yes, Intro to Programming with Xojo is free!

Can I ask my beginner questions? Yes, the Xojo forum is a gateway to the friendly and helpful Xojo community.

The Xojo language is Object-Oriented. Object-Oriented programming is an excellent way to learn the fundamentals of computer programming. Xojo is also cross-platform, which means you can build apps for all kinds of platforms using a single code base. Xojo is a Rapid Application Development tool, which means it’s developed to make building apps simple and quick.

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Your Anti-Virus Software and Xojo

UPDATE 12/2024

Though increasingly rare, we do still hear from Xojo users who get false positives from their anti-virus software when downloading Xojo or running Xojo applications. We’ve even heard of this occurring when users are debugging apps from the IDE. To get around this, you can refer to the documentation for your anti-virus software on how to exclude Xojo from scans. To fix these issues for yourself and future Xojo users, we ask that you report these occurrences to your anti-virus software makers.

If you are on Windows, you may also be interested in Avoiding False-Positive Virus Detection in Windows Apps


We’ve occasionally heard from Xojo users that their anti-virus software gives them a warning about Xojo. All of these have been false positives and we ask that you report these to your virus software makers if it happens to you.

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Casting about in both 32 and 64 bit worlds

Consider the following code:

dim i64 as Int64 = 1234567
dim i32 as int32 = 7654321

i32 = Int32(i64) // cast
i64 = Int64(i32) // cast

i32 = Ctype(i64, Int32) // convert
i64 = Ctype(i32, Int64) // convert

It all seems reasonable enough. Not useful, but seems reasonable. Only one problem. It won’t compile. Why not? The two casts to int32 and int64 will fail. Now why is that?

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