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Xojo Programming Blog Posts

Let Your OS X Desktop App React to Custom URIs

Have you ever wondered how the magic behind the “mailto://” or other similar Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) work? Whether from the web browser URL field or from Xojo via the ShowURL function, when URIs are executed the registered app opens showing the passed parameters (for example, in the Mail app for the ‘To’, ‘Subject’ and ‘Body’ fields).

Implementing this kind of behavior in your OS X apps is not rocket science! Follow these simple steps in order to register a custom URI from your app.

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Conditional Breakpoints

You can set breakpoints in your Xojo code that cause the debugger to appear when the line of code with the breakpoint is reached. This is incredibly handy to help understand and test your code.

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WeakRef and Memory Management

Object Oriented Programming with Xojo, and in this case Event Oriented Programming as well, is simply wonderful. You create objects (Instances) from the defined classes that act as templates and just let them roll. From there, the interactions made by the user are those that determine how objects interact with each other via sending messages to each other (method calls), the access to properties and also the execution of events.

However, sometimes the combination can simply reach unstable situations by the very nature of our applications and here is where failures can arise in memory management. Fortunately, we can keep this under control with the help of the WeakRef class.

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Xojo Programming Language: 6 Fascinating Facts

Xojo is similar to VB, Java and C#

The Xojo programming language is fully object-oriented and uses an object model that is quite similar to VB, Java and C#. If you are used those languages at all, you’ll be right at home with Xojo.

Available since 1998, Xojo was one of the first languages to use Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), something that other languages such as Swift and Objective-C now use. Xojo is type-safe and fully object-oriented making it easy to learn and use, but it also has advanced features such as namespaces, extension methods, exception handling, introspection, delegates and more.

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The Chinook Sample Database

Have you ever needed or wanted a populated sample database with several related tables to play around with? Perhaps you are learning about databases and database design or perhaps you want to try out a new tool such as Xojo but want a pre-build database to start with.

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Easy as Pi: GPIO updates

We are always keen to see apps and projects that Xojo developers have made for their Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computers. Especially since Xojo 2019r1 when building for Pi Desktop and Console is free with Xojo Pi!

I am pleased to announce some updates to our GPIO project to make it even easier to use more types of hardware in your Raspberry Pi projects.

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Introspection

Introspection is a very handy and useful part of the Xojo language.

You can use it to examine a lot of the objects that are in memory at runtime. You can access the properties in those objects, call methods on those objects and even create new instances (with some caveats here).

But there are limits to what you can do with it. You can’t use it to create things that do not exist at runtime because they’ve been stripped out when your app was built.

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