For those of you that don’t consider reading through over 220 items as fun as I do, here are a few things I thought I would highlight, in no particular order.

• Desktop projects now save icon resources as compressed PNGs. This can greatly reduce binary/xml project file size and also reduce the .xojoresources file size in text projects. In the case of the Eddie’s Electronics sample project, the binary project dropped from 11MB to 780K, the XML project from 22MB to 1.1MB and the .xojoresources file from 11MB to 388K.

• Need to iterate through a String’s characters in a completely unicode-friendly way (including emojis)? Rather than using the String.Characters iterator, use the new String.Codepoints iterator which returns one value for each unicode scalar.

• You can now install Xojo on Windows ARM 64-bit. Xojo itself remains an Intel x86-64 binary, but Windows ARM has a translation system built-in that will allow Xojo to run. This should allow those of you using ARM Windows in a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac to use Xojo there. If you’re interested in native Xojo support for Windows ARM, subscribe to Feedback Case 62672 so you’ll be notified of updates.

• Auto-complete continues to get smarter and faster. It can’t quite write your code for you, but now it does a better job of substituting text and offering suggestions, among other things.

• The Code Editor has more improvements, particularly in the area of code folding. Another improvement is that you can use Go To Location to jump to a specific line in the code using “#50” (for example) in addition to the previously allowed “50”.

• For use with Declares, there is now an OSHandle class that can handle either an Integer or a Ptr.

• And although we mentioned it in another blog post, I’d still like to remind people that you can again build your Mac apps from Windows and Linux. Improvements in the open-source linker project used by Xojo allowed us to bring this feature back. Of course, please continue to test your Mac apps on an actual Mac before you ship them.

When dealing with how variables are shown by auto-complete, you first need to understand the concept of a variable’s ‘visibility’ or scope.

When a variable is declared, its scope is limited to the block of code in which it is declared. For example, add a method with this code:

Dim myVariable As Integer
For myVariable = 0 To 9
  // Do something
  MsgBox(myVariable.ToText)
Next

In the above code the scope of the variable myVariable is the entire method. This includes being within the ‘For…Next’ loop.

Now consider this code in a method:

For myVariable As Integer = 0 To 9
  // Do something
  MsgBox(myVariable.ToText)
Next
// myVariable cannot be used here and will not auto-complete

The block of code within which myVariable is declared is the ‘For…Next’ loop.  The scope starts at ‘For’ and ends at ‘Next’. Because of this limiting scope myVariable does not auto-complete outside the loop and if you type it manually in code like this you will get a compile error for that line that says “This item does not exist”:

For myVariable As Integer = 0 To 9
  // Do something
  MsgBox(myVariable.ToText)
Next
myVariable = 10 // compile error here

(Thanks to Robin Lauryssen-Mitchell for this tip.)