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Xojo Programming Blog Posts

Net Neutrality is dead, long live Net Neutrality!

Net Neutrality is dead, long live Net Neutrality!

Published June 13, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

Earlier this week, the FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality officially when into effect. What does this mean? It means that the rules that were put into place to prevent ISPs from abusing their power are gone. You might be wondering what power they actually have? I’ve already written about this before but in summary, most people only have a single option for internet service. That means that for them, there is no competition. Their ISP has them by the proverbial short hairs and there’s no other place most of us can go for Internet access. Net Neutrality at least prevented those ISPs from really abusing their monopoly. That’s now gone.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, you’re not going to see your Internet service suddenly slow to a crawl or block specific sites. It will be more of a steady decline. It’s like having terminal cancer. It won’t kill you tomorrow but it will eventually.

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Which DLLs can I move and where?

Published June 3, 2018 by Norman Palardy

After seeing this conversation on the forums, I thought it would be helpful to run through why you can move some of your app’s DLLs but you cannot move others.

On Windows, the Visual Studio C Runtime DLLs can be in one of two locations on systems that do not already have them installed. All versions of Windows prior to Windows 10 would need these installed.

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Prepare Your Classes to Work in Simulated or Real Modes

Published June 1, 2018 by Javier Menendez

In many of our development projects, if not all, we are confronted with situations when we need to test our classes before the final deployment of a project. I’m not talking about Unit Testing here, though I highly recommend the excellent session on that topic from XDC 2018.

For example, it would not be desirable to send hundreds of emails to all the entries in a database simply to test one of the workflow steps or to verify that emails are being delivered as expected. It would be a lot simpler, and less disruptive to those using your app, to test using a few email addresses that are under your control.

So let’s establish a mechanism that allows us tell our apps when to run in a “simulated” mode vs. a “real” mode for all or some of the components that we need to test along the development cycle.

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5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

Published May 30, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

These days everyone has a great idea for an app. Maybe you have an idea that would save you time at work, or maybe you’ve been thinking of an app that would automate something you do at home. Not sure where to start? One of your first steps is choosing a development tool that is right for you and for your project.

Here are five questions to guide your decision:

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Identify Images Using IBM Watson’s Remote APIs

Identify Images Using IBM Watson’s Remote APIs

Published May 23, 2018 by Xojo

Some of the most interesting web services you can use with Xojo through remote API calls are related to Artificial Intelligence. There are many different APIs provided by the main players in the AI sector, but IBM’s Watson is by far the most well known.

I’m going to show you how to connect to IBM’s Watson services with REST APIs and how to use them with Xojo projects to identify images. This is just one example, of course, of the many ways to utilize Watson and AI in your Xojo apps.

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Create Your Own ImageWell Based on Canvas

Published May 7, 2018 by Javier Menendez

Whether you are using Xojo to create your very first application or if you are coming from other languages, like C# or VisualBasic, customized UI controls are probably one of those things you have in your to-do list. For multiplatform Desktop apps, you will find that the Canvas class offers everything you need. In order to show you how easy it can be, follow this tutorial to recreate the ImageWell UI class control, provided by default in the Xojo framework. Our customized ImageWell will be able to proportionally display any JPEG file dropped by the user on the control, centering it on the available surface.

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Predicting the Future: Communication & Xojo’s Roadmap

Published May 4, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

If you spend enough time trying to predict the future, you learn that the more variables there are, the more difficult it becomes to determine a future. Take the weather for example. It’s not hard to predict tomorrow’s weather because there’s not much that will change over the next 12 hours or so. Try to predict the weather 7 days from now, 7 months or worse, 7 years from now, and your results will begin to vary dramatically.

This is certainly the case when it comes to writing apps. The bigger any one particular feature is, the more variables there are that affect it and thus the more difficult it becomes to predict how long it will take to finish. You don’t have to work in the software business very long to figure this out. Like most people in the software industry, we’ve been trying (with varying degrees of accuracy) to do this not just for our own internal planning but because we know you want, and need, to know as well.

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