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Category: Technology

Making a Mac App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published May 18, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.

First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.

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Appreciating SQL

Published May 9, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Noted recently at the SQLizer blog, the SQL language was first created 43 years ago. And what is remarkable about that is that SQL is still used today. According to the Stack Overflow 2017 developer survey it is the #2 programming language. Not many languages remain in use for such a long period of time. Although we’re happy to also note that Xojo celebrated our 20th anniversary in 2016!

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The Ultimate Password Solution

Published May 4, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

World Password Day brings attention to some simple steps everyone can take to secure their digital life: 1. Create Strong Passwords, 2. Use a different password for each account, and 3. Get a password manager, no, not a post-it note in your desk drawer!

The best password is one that is diffcult to guess. But difficult to guess takes on a new meaning when hackers use computers to do the guessing. Hence, the best password becomes one that would take a computer so long to guess that it’s not practical to do so. That means a long series of random characters and the longer and more random, the better, and a different password for every site you use.

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There’s No Excuse For Storing Passwords

There’s No Excuse For Storing Passwords

Published May 4, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

A few years ago it was reported that Russian hackers had stolen 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from a variety of websites. This was only possible because those websites were storing the actual password. Because it’s World Password Day and because this is web security 101, let’s discuss why there’s really no excuse for a website to store your password – ever.

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Taking Your App From In-House to Commercial

Published April 25, 2017 by Xojo

Server Ranger started life as a small in-house Xojo console project that I used to monitor servers for several clients. Rather than getting paged (in the very early days) or getting angry phonecalls from clients, it was much more pleasant to have my app play an alert on my Mac and send me an email to notify me of a server issue. With this heads-up, it was often possible to have the issue resolved before a client even realised there had been an issue.

Like many in-house solutions, the demand on Server Ranger increased over time and it became a more vital part of my business.

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