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Category: Windows

Posts related to Windows-specific development.

Tip: Use Constants to Improve Code Readability

Published November 25, 2015 by Xojo

Wayne Golding has been a Xojo developer since 2005. He operates an IT Company Axis Direct Ltd www.axisdirect.nz which primarily develops applications using Xojo that integrate with Xero www.xero.com.  Wayne’s hobby is robotics where he uses Xojo to build applications for his Pi2 often implementing IoT for remote control.

Guest Post Tip: Formatted Text/Strings in Xojo

Writing long concatenated text in Xojo (or any programming language) tends to make the code difficult to read. Typically there is a block of code that has line extenders (_), a single line that goes on forever or a block of code that appends text to an existing variable. All are hard to read. And when you add SQL statements to the mix it can become difficult to easily see what you are trying to achieve.

I’€™ve started using Constants for this reason.

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The Citizen Developer

The Citizen Developer

Published November 19, 2015 by Paul Lefebvre

I’m seeing more and more headlines about how citizen developers are helping create the apps that business need.

In particular, a recent article at ZDNet, “The advent of the citizen developer” talks about how non-programmers can help create the apps needed by an enterprise company:

So the business-side has long had to place their fate in the hands of those with the requisite skills but often with little sympathy for or first-hand knowledge of the business itself. Or they just ended-up acquiring pre-existing software that was a close enough fit, and then had it configured to their needs. Neither path has typically produced tech solutions that fit business needs very well, and ‘good enough’ has usually been the mantra of the day.

These articles explain how “citizen developers”, sometimes referred to as a business analysts (or maybe even power-users), are using rapid application development tools to create apps that helps the business solve a problem more quickly than going through a more formal and lengthy IT process.

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Build All The Things

Published November 11, 2015 by Paul Lefebvre

As you may have heard, Xojo 2015 Release 3 added the long-awaited ability to create 64-bit apps. And it also added the ability to create Raspberry Pi 2 apps (Linux ARM). This now means there are lots more apps that can get built.

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Guest Post: Part 1, Transparent Label Tip for Windows

Published November 6, 2015 by Xojo

Wayne Golding has been a Xojo developer since 2005. He operates an IT Company Axis Direct Ltd www.axisdirect.nz which primarily develops applications using Xojo that integrate with Xero www.xero.com.  Wayne’s hobby is robotics where he uses Xojo to build applications for his Pi2 often implementing IoT for remote control.

When developing for Windows, it’s not immediately clear how to set up a transparent label. If you change the background colour of your Window, you could end up with that ugly gray label. And of course I always forgot to set the transparency until after the debug run. But I’ve found a simple solution.

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HTMLViewer Engines on Windows

Published October 12, 2015 by Greg O'Lone

HTMLViewer on the desktop has two engines that you can select from, Native and Webkit. Native uses the built-in browser engine on each platform – Webkit on OS X, Internet Explorer on Windows, and Webkit on Linux, if it’s installed. If you select “Webkit”, the Chrome Embedded Browser libraries are included with your built app and HTMLViewer will use that instead. There are pros and cons to each, but usually the reason people choose WebKit over Native on Windows is because choosing Native gets you whatever the minimum version of Internet Explorer is for a particular OS. This means:

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