With this in mind, here’s an infographic that illustrates how Xojo’s been continually updating and modernizing since 1996 while other development tools come and go.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube

You still hear this same argument today in the software development world, where the big names are Microsoft, Apple and Google.

But how “safe” is their stuff, really? After all, they all seem to end support for products and tools rather often.

Microsoft recently announced that they are discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, which was only just introduced in 2016. Last I checked, Microsoft is a Very. Big. Company. Yet they somehow cannot justify resources to keep a Mac IDE viable. Clearly, they have the resources so this is a decision about Microsoft’s focus and priorities, things that Big Companies change all the time.

Google drops products (or drastically changes them) often. Changing their “free for life” Google Apps (G Suite) product to a rather expensive monthly cost was not popular with many businesses.

Apple killed off iBooks Author, and although it was not a development tool, it was something that was heavily promoted for a while as the best way to make content for the iBooks Store. In the development world, Apple killed off their Carbon OS framework in favor of Cocoa after years of telling developers the two would co-exist.

In the 2000s before working here at Xojo, I did a lot of consulting (frequently migrating VB6 apps to Xojo) and one question that was often asked of me is “why should I go with a dev tool from a small company like Xojo instead of something from a big name like Microsoft?”.

The answer I always gave at the time was: “You’re coming to me to migrate a VB6 app. VB6 was from Microsoft and they killed the product off. Big companies do that all the time. A small company like Xojo focuses entirely on their product. It gets all their attention. If you had picked Xojo in 1999 instead of VB6, we would not be having this conversation right now.”

To that end, Xojo has been around since 1998 and has outlived many other development tools and platforms. Some of which come to mind are: Visual Basic 6, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, and (now) Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac.

Technologies are also regularly discontinued by the creators in favor of newer versions. It took years for the Python community to move from Python 2 to Python 3. But when Apple finally removed Python 2 from macOS last year, there were many apps and companies that had to scramble to update their code. PHP8 was release in 2020, but as of today adoption is only about 12%. In 2017, Google switched from Java to Kotlin as the official language of Android, impacting many. Apple promotes Swift and Swift UI over Objective-C and AppKit these days. They introduced Catalyst, but it appears to not be making much headway. Microsoft pushes out new frameworks at a rapid pace, which is exciting, but can be difficult for a development team to know what to pick.

I don’t bring these things up to point out mistakes. Change is inevitable in technology after all. I only bring these up to point out that, even with the big names, there are still risks.

All this is to say that if you are an enterprise company with a large investment in software and IT, you might want to take a look outside the big names and see what Xojo can offer. I realize that if you have standardized on a set of tools from a large vendor, say C# and Microsoft, you are probably thinking “there’s no way I’m switching to Xojo no matter what this guy says”.

We at Xojo agree. You probably should not be switching everything over to Xojo. That would be insanely expensive and risky. But Xojo can be a great complement to the tools you already use. Professional software developers (and their companies) keep lots of tools in their toolbox and Xojo should be one of those tools.

So what can Xojo do for you?

Xojo’s goal is to make programming easier, allowing you to get software made faster. Xojo saves you time and money. To that end, in enterprise environments Xojo is great for:

• Prototypes and proof-of-concepts
• Internal tools and utilities
• Testing
• Demos

With Xojo you can quickly build a desktop app (for mac, Windows or Linux) to test out REST APIs. You can build a web app to demonstrate some UI concepts or easily distribute information. You can build a mobile app (iOS or Android) to quickly try out ideas. Xojo lets you do All The Things without having to deal with a bunch of different complex tools and technologies. Xojo can give you the speed and power of low-code tools without all the limitations.

Xojo makes it quicker and easier to try out software ideas before you commit expensive development resources to your primary tools. A company’s biggest expense is usually salary and using an expensive IT department to slowly build everything is not a great value. You spend too much money on salary and sacrifice too much time on lost opportunities. Using Xojo instead can save you significant money that you can put towards the projects you determine are viable and worth more investment.

And don’t forget about internal tools. Every company needs internal tools of some kind and these won’t generate revenue on their own. Forcing these tools to go through an overworked IT department is slow and expensive. But not building them at all means your staff is less productive than they could be. Your advanced power users can use Xojo to create tools that will improve productivity at a fraction of the cost and avoid lost opportunities waiting for IT.

Like Apple, Google and Microsoft, Xojo isn’t perfect. We’ve made our share of mistakes, such as our transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 which was not as smooth as we had hoped it would be. The team is only human, but we do our best to learn from mistakes and if nothing else we are perseverant and committed to always making Xojo better. The fact that we’ve been doing this since 1998 is a testament to that.

So join the many other enterprise customers that use Xojo as a secret weapon! You might find you like using a development tool from a small company that cares about its product and its customers.

You can try Xojo for free today. Licensing is available for as low as $399 per user (even lower when purchased in bulk). Contact us at hello@xojo.com for more information or to get a quote.

Paul learned to program in BASIC at age 13 and has programmed in more languages than he remembers, with Xojo being an obvious favorite. When not working on Xojo, you can find him talking about retrocomputing at Goto 10 and on Mastodon @lefebvre@hachyderm.io.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube

Unlike VB and VB.NET, Xojo allows you to develop on your platform of choice- Windows, Mac or Linux. But being able to develop wherever you like isn’t the only reason Xojo is a great alternative to Visual Basic. Xojo is fully object-oriented, supported and regularly updated. It allows you to cross-compile desktop apps for Windows, Mac and Linux and Raspberry Pi. Currently, a Mac is required to compile projects for macOS and for iOS development and compilation; learn why. In additional to all this, Xojo allows you to compile apps for mobile and the web with that same powerful language and IDE.

Evaluating Xojo as a Visual Basic Alternative

Xojo is free for learning and development so you can take all the time you need to evaluate. Download Xojo and start learning while you develop, run and debug your projects in Xojo’s free IDE. Going through the QuickStarts and Tutorials, you’ll recognize how your knowledge of VB leads you to quickly embrace Xojo. Purchase a license only when you are ready to compile your projects.

To help make your transition from Visual Basic to Xojo easier, download this open-source Xojo.VB library that maps many Visual Basic commands to their Xojo equivalents. Watch this Migrating from VB video to see a simple VB app get migrated to Xojo. Visit our Migrating from Visual Basic page at the Xojo Docs for more details about Data Types, Commands and Controls.

Modernize Visual Basic Apps for Web and Mobile

Xojo it is a great way to modernize legacy Visual Basic desktop apps to web and mobile platforms.

Web Development – With Xojo’s programming language and IDE, web apps are as simple to develop as desktop apps. Instead of HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and AJAX, you’ll save tons of development time using the Xojo programming language. Xojo web apps are compiled to binary code and can be deployed to any server (Linux, macOS or Windows) as standalone web apps. For simple, secure one-click deployment of web apps plus built-in SSL and database support, use Xojo Cloud.

Mobile Development – With Xojo iOS you can design your apps using drag and drop in the layout editor, add your code and build. Access the iOS-features you’d expect, like sharing panel and your photo library, and also the iPhone’s hardware-based features, like motion, location and camera. Xojo makes iOS development familiar and fast. Xojo Android is currently in development.

Similarities Between Xojo and Visual Basic

As a Visual Basic developer, you will find Xojo very familiar. VB and Visual Basic.NET use a language similar to the Xojo programming language. You will notice that many of the commands are nearly the same. The default UI controls included with VB are, for the most part, also included with Xojo. You’ll also find that Xojo has several controls that are not included by default with VB like HTMLViewer/WebHTMLViewer, MoviePlayer/WebMoviePlayer and SearchField. 

Language – The Xojo programming language has commands like If..Then..Else, For..Next, and While..Loop. You will also find the object-oriented capabilities of Xojo are quite similar to VB.NET.

Data Types – Xojo shares many of the same data types with VB6 and VB.NET, including: Integer, Double, String/Text, Currency, Boolean, Variant.

Controls – Xojo has many common controls including: Buttons, Labels, TextFields, TextAreas, ListBoxes (grids), PopupMenus, ProgressBars, toolbars and more.

Differences Between Xojo and Visual Basic

Xojo definitely feels similar to Visual Basic, but you’ll find there are differences too. Many of these differences stem from Xojo’s focus on being cross-platform.

Shared Libraries – Xojo cannot create DLLs, ActiveX controls, .NET assemblies or any kind of shared libraries. Since these are all Windows-specific technologies, that is somewhat understandable for a cross-platform tool. If you’re depending on a DLL and are planning to deploy on Mac or Linux, you’ll need another solution for those operating systems. Fortunately, Xojo supports conditional compilation which makes it easy for your code to use DLLs only when compiling for Windows. If you find another library that provides a solution for MacOS and/or Linux, you can use conditional compilation there as well.

Compiler and Run-time – Xojo apps are compiled to native code. They do not contain byte-code that is run by a virtual machine (as with .NET). The run-time library is included with your applications so there is nothing additional that needs to be installed on users’ computers.

Language and Framework – Xojo is fully object-oriented. Unlike VB6, you can have classes that use inheritance and other object-oriented features. The Xojo framework is designed to be simple to use and support cross-platform applications; it provides access to many things you’ve come to expect such as file handling, databases, graphics and more.

File I/O – One of the biggest differences between VB6 and Xojo is file I/O. Xojo consolidates all its file processing into a few classes: FolderItem, TextInputStream, TextOutputStream and BinaryStream. VB6 uses hard-coded file paths and less flexible file access methods, primarily because it only needs to work with Windows-specific file paths.

Data Types – Xojo is strongly typed, just like VB.NET. VB6 allows you to do some things the old-school, BASIC way, the most significant of which is using variables without declaring them (the type is inferred by a suffix on the name). Xojo does not allow this. Use the OPTION EXPLICIT command in all your Visual Basic code to have VB enforce explicit variable declarations.

Improved Error Handling – Xojo has modern exception handling using Try/Catch, Exception and App.UnhandledException.

Enjoy Coding Again

Whether you need VB for Mac, or VB for Linux or just an updated, rapid-application development tool for Windows, Xojo is that alternative! If you find yourself frustrated with VB.NET or you’re still looking for something to replace VB6, test out Xojo. If saving time and money is a concern, Xojo is a development tool you should consider. Go ahead and download Xojo and see how much you have missed coding like this!

Like all development tools we know Xojo isn’t a fit for every project, so all Xojo licenses come with a 90 day money-back guarantee. We’ve been around for more than 25 years now, and we’ll be here when your next project is looking for a quick way to get off the ground and into development! Questions? I’m here for that, email me, a human being and Xojo fan, anytime at hello@xojo.com.