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Month: December 2017

WinAPILib on GitHub

Many 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.

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Make Your Own Classes Iterables

In programming, iterators are the mechanisms that allow us to walk all the members of a collection without needing to know in advance how many of them compose such a collection; and for that we can find in Xojo the commands For Each… Next. What are the main differences in comparison to the conventional For… Next?

The first difference is that with For Each… Next we can’t assume that we are iterating the members of the collection in order, as it is the case when using the variable of the conventional For… Next as the Index in order to access a known member of the collection. The second difference is that the iterator will be invalid when the iterated elements are modified, or when we modify the amount of elements in the collection during the iteration process.

By default in Xojo, there are a couple of collections that are iterable: the already mentioned Arrays and also Dictionaries and FolderItem.Children. Wouldn’t it be great to extend this feature so we can add this behaviour to our own classes making them more flexible? The key to making this happen is using the two Class Interfaces already included in Xojo: Iterator and Iterable.

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Xojo and Community Growth in 2017

2017 has been a good year for Xojo! We hit some bumps but we’re ending the year with the much-awaited Xojo 64-bit IDE released in Xojo 2017r3.
Though we didn’t have a XDC in 2017, we’re gearing up for XDC 2018 in Denver in April. This is the longest between conferences in many years and we’re seeing an increase in early registrations. If you are planning on attending, please register soon. We have sold out before!
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Compilers 102 – Parser

At XDC 2016 there was a lot of interest in our Compiler session and LLVM. I’ve summarized a bit about LLVM in an earlier post, but to take things further, we put together this series of blog posts on compilers.

These will all be at a high-level. None of these posts are going to teach you how to write a compiler. The goal of these posts is for you to have a basic understanding of the components of a compiler and how they all work together to create a native app.

This is the second post in our ongoing series on compilers. I recommend that you first read Compilers 101 – Overview and Lexer before continuing.

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Compilers 101 – Overview and Lexer

At XDC 2016 there was a lot of interest in our Compiler session and LLVM. I’ve summarized a bit about LLVM in an earlier post, but to take things further, we put together this series of blog posts on compilers.

These will all be at a high-level. None of these posts are going to teach you how to write a compiler. The goal of these posts is for you to have a basic understanding of the components of a compiler and how they all work together to create a native app.

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The Last Mile: Why Net Neutrality is a Must

During the Obama administration, internet service providers (ISPs) were reclassified as Telecommunication Service Providers.  This meant that they would be treated like phone companies, as common carriers with all the regulation that implies. Prior to this they were classified as Information Providers which clearly made no sense since ISPs provide the network, not the actual content. Most importantly, Net Neutrality prevents ISPs from providing paid fast lanes which would allow companies to pay ISPs to make traffic to their site faster than traffic to other sites.

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