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Tag: Microsoft

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

Published June 5, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

In previous articles, I’ve written about how Xojo is often much, much easier to use and more capable than Visual Studio for Mac for creating Mac and cross-platform desktop apps.

Visual Studio can also create web apps and as it would turn out, you may find that Xojo is a better option for web apps.

Technically, Visual Studio for Mac can create ASP.NET Core Web Apps. These type of web apps use the ASP.NET framework, but do not provide a form (layout editor) for your app’s user interface. Instead you’ll have to create everything in code, including mapping UI actions to corresponding code. ASP.NET Core also requires you to use the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern, which can be a bit daunting for beginners.

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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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Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

Published February 7, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

From a recent Ars Technical article called “The future of Microsoft’s languages“, emphasis mine:

In spite of its name, the current Visual Basic is not the same language as the ancient Visual Basic 6, nor the Visual Basic for Applications used for macroing. The transition to .NET in 2002, with what was called, at the time, Visual Basic.NET, left developers familiar with those languages high and dry; although the new language was called Visual Basic, and looked a bit like Visual Basic, it was really just C# in disguise. There was no good migration path from old to new, and much of the simplicity of those older languages was forfeit.

This is a primary reason why so many Visual Basic developers choose Xojo after trying Microsoft Visual Basic (.NET): they don’t want “C# in disguise”.

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Windows App Requirements

Published May 19, 2016 by Paul Lefebvre

Microsoft refactored their core app runtimes in 2015. They have made what they call a “Universal C Runtime” which has been distributed via Windows Update to all supported versions of Windows that stay up-to-date (which is the default behavior for Windows Update).

Starting with Xojo 2016r1, the Xojo Windows framework has been updated to use the latest Microsoft tools. This allows Xojo to stay up to date and allows the Windows support to be improved in future releases. This means that Xojo itself now uses the new Universal Runtime and your built apps now require it.

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