When creating multi-platform apps, you are often going to be working with a variety of operating systems. Take advantage of Remote Debugging and make your life a lot easier!
The Remote Debugger that is included with Xojo makes it easy for you to develop primarily on a single platform, but to debug and test on other OS platforms.
For example, with the Remote Debugger you can be running Xojo on OS X, but can run your project in debug mode on a virtual machine (or a physical machine) that is running Windows 8.1.
Speaking of virtual machines, I find that they are a great way to have a wide variety of OS environments for testing purposes. There are several VM products that work great with Remote Debugging:
- Virtual PC
- VMware Workstation
- VMware Fusion
- Parallels Desktop
- VirtualBox
Personally, I use VMware Fusion. Looking at my Virtual Machine Library, I have:
- Windows 8.1 x86
- Windows 8.1 x64
- Windows 7 x86
- Windows 7 x64
- Windows Vista x64
- Windows XP SP3 x86
- OS X 10.9
- OS X 10.8
- OS X 10.7
- OS X 10.6 Server
- OS X 10.5
- Ubuntu 13.10 x86
- Ubuntu 12.10 x86
- OpenSUSE 12
I’m in the process of setting up VMs for CentOS, Debian and Fedora as well. All of my VMs are configured with Xojo and the Remote Debugger. Once they are configured, I can start the VM and choose Project->Run Remotely from Xojo to run my project on the VM while still debugging on Xojo on OS X.
If you are not using the Remote Debugger and Virtual Machines, I encourage you to give both a try. For more information about the Remote Debugger, refer to User Guide Book 3: Framework, Chapter 8: Debugging, Section 4: Remote Debugging (PDF), also available directly from the Help menu in Xojo (iBooks version also available in the iBookstore).
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