Author: Norman Palardy

I know a lot of people like to write their local variable declarations like this:

dim i, i, j as integerdim k as double, s as string, b as boolean

Personally, I don’t and the reason is not that I like typing…

There is a “bug” here, can you spot it?

dim s as string = "abc" + chrb(0) + "def"
dim c as cstring = s
if s = c then
  msgbox "Yay our software works as we expected!!!!"
else
  msgbox "BOOOOOO!!!!"
end if

Shadowing is when a subclass defines a constant, property or enumeration (almost anything that is not an event or a method) that has the same name as a constant, property or enumeration (but not an event or a method) in the superclass. Generally the best rule is avoid using the same names for constants, properties and enumerations that the superclass has already used.

If you’ve worked with times and dates you know how much fun they can be especially when you deal with different time zones, differing Daylight savings time rules, if they observe DST and all the other intricacies tracking dates and times bring up.

And very often you need to save data to a database. So how do you store the data in your database so you can properly deal with it? And does your chosen database make that easy?

This came up recently on the forums and I thought it good to share. Do you see what is wrong with the following code?

Function foo() As FolderItem
  try
    beep
  catch NilObjectException
    return nil
  end try
End Function

One frequent request we get is to make it so users can run an application in any language that an app is built for and NOT the one the OS would use (for OS X see this blog post, Windows and Linux aren’t quite so dynamic).

But sometimes we get requests to be able to create an application that can run in a language that is NOT the same one used by the OS.

In Xojo, extension methods are methods that, while not part of the original definition of a type, are treated as though they are part of that data type.

As I mentioned in a previous post, beginning with Xojo 2013r4 we will no longer be localizing the IDE into any European languages. Some of our German users on OS X were surprised this morning when they launched today’s release (2013r4) expecting to get the English version of the IDE only to discover it in Japanese instead. Is this a bug?