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.

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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.

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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.

Arguably the “best” place is to install them in the Windows\System directory so that normal OS updates will keep them up to date. This requires the use of an installer as putting files in the Windows\System directories needs elevated privileges.

The other place they can be is right next to the app executable itself — but not in a subdirectory like plugins can be.

Why can’t they be in a subdirectory like plugins? When the OS starts to load and execute your application the OS loads whatever DLLs are required as part of starting the app. These required DLLs must be available where the OS finds them; not where the Xojo framework would because your app isn’t running yet. And since the app isn’t running yet the app cannot alter where the OS looks for them.

Normally Windows looks in these locations:

1. The directory where the executable module for the current process is located.
2. The current directory.
3. The Windows system directory. The GetSystemDirectory function retrieves the path of this directory.
4. The Windows directory. The GetWindowsDirectory function retrieves the path of this directory.
5. The directories listed in the PATH environment variable.

For plugins, the Xojo runtime is specifically loading the DLLs using LoadLibrary and in that case the framework can tell exactly where to look (and where not to look) for the required DLLs which is why they can be in <appname> Libs or just Libs. And this is why the Visual Studio C Runtimes cannot be moved but plugin DLLs can be.

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.

I was not able to find a concise tutorial on how to use ASP.NET Core with Visual Studio for Mac. The primary tutorial on the Microsoft Doc site, Building your first ASP.NET Core MVC app with Visual Studio, shows you how to make a simple web app to show movies from a movies database but it consists of 10 separate sections, each rather lengthy, and it is not specific to Visual Studio for Mac but is instead for Visual Studio for Windows.

So to demonstrate something a bit simpler, here is how you can create a Xojo web app that works like the “Hello” app shown in the native Mac and cross-platform desktop app posts.

A Simple Xojo Web App

Start by downloading and installing Xojo.

1. Launch Xojo and select “Web” from the Project Chooser. Enter an Application Name of “HelloWeb” and click OK. You’ll see the structure for a Xojo web app with these parts: App, Session, and WebPage1. Since WebPage1 is selected you’ll also see the Layout Editor, something not available in Visual Studio for Mac.
2. In the Layout Editor, you can drag and drop controls to create the UI for your web app. Drag a Button control and a Label control on to the layout so that it looks like this:
   
3. Click on the Button and then select “Inspector” in the toolbar. Change the Name property from “Button1” to “ClickButton” and change the Caption property from “Untitled” to “Click Me”.
4. Now click on the Label and change its Name property to “ClickLabel” and its Text property to “The button has not yet been clicked”.

You are done with the layout and can move on to the code.

5. To track the number of clicks you’ll want to add a property. Click the “+” button on the Layout Editor command bar and select Property. Give it the name “NumberOfTimesClicked”. Leave the Type as Integer.
6. The last thing to add is the code to increase the clicks and display them in the label. Click on WebPage1 to go back to the layout and double-click on ClickButton to show the Event Handler window. Click on Action and then OK. This displays a blank Code Editor. Here you’ll put the code to run when the button is clicked. This is the code:

NumberOfTimesClicked = NumberOfTimesClicked + 1

Dim buttonText As Text = "The button has been clicked {0} time{1}."
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{0}", NumberOfTimesClicked.ToText)
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{1}", If(NumberOfTimesClicked > 1, "s", ""))
ClickLabel.Text = buttonText

If you read the native Mac app post or the cross-platform desktop app post you’ll notice something. The steps and code are exactly the same when creating a Xojo web app as when you are making a Xojo desktop app, at least for this simple example.

You should now save your project.

Testing

To test your project, just click the big Run button on the toolbar. This starts the web app in your default browser. Click the button to see the label get updated.

Indeed this is a ridiculously simple app and is really designed just to give you a quick feel for the development environment. But it should be pretty obvious that Xojo is much, much simpler to use for creating web apps than Visual Studio for Mac.

But Xojo has one other huge advantage when it comes to web apps: deployment.

If you need the fastest possible way to deploy your Xojo web apps, you can sign up for Xojo Cloud and then with just a single click of the “Deploy” button on the toolbar your app is built and uploaded to your server for use by anyone.

If you would rather use your own servers you also have the option of deploying a Xojo web app as a single executable file with a built-in web server (Linux, Windows and Mac servers are supported). Or you can use deploy your Xojo web app so it uses a CGI interface to connect to your own Apache web server.

Visit the Xojo Dev Center to learn more about Xojo Web App Deployment.

Visual Studio for Mac lets you make cross-platform desktop apps by using the Gtk# UI toolkit. Unfortunately, Gtk# does not create native apps for any platform and you’ll be required to manually install the required .NET run-time library in order for these apps to work. Packaging these types of apps can be a pain and is not done automatically by Visual Studio for Mac.

Although Visual Studio for Mac doesn’t include a layout editor when creating native Mac apps, it does include a Layout Editor for your Gtk# layouts. Here you can see the control layout for a simple “Hello” app with just a button and a label:



The Layout Editor is a bit tricky to work with as dragging controls around does not show you exactly where they will be positioned, making it hard to line things up.

For comparison, this is what the Layout Editor looks like in Xojo:



To add code to the button in Visual Studio for Mac you have to click on the Signals tab in the Properties and add a handler to the Clicked signal. Once you do this, you can switch back to the source code file to add the code. Here you can see the source for MainWindow.cs and the “Clicked” handler that updates the number of clicks and displays the count in the label:

The above process for adding an event is not too bad, but Xojo makes it even easier by letting you add event handlers to a control by simply double-clicking on the control itself. For example, double-click the button to show the Event Handler window where you can add the Action event handler to the button by simply selecting it from a list:


And then entering the code in the Code Editor:



So you can see some similarity between working with Visual Studio for Mac with a Gtk# project and a Xojo desktop project. Obviously you can tell that Xojo uses a programming language that looks similar to VB, but the object-oriented programming model used by Xojo is similar to the one used by C#.

The big difference, as mentioned earlier, is that Visual Studio for Mac does not build native apps. Instead when you build the project shown above you’ll get an app called “HelloMac.exe” which doesn’t run on any platform without first installing the proper run-time libraries, not always an easy task. And a file with the extension of “exe” certainly does not look like a native Mac or Linux app so you’ll want to package that up to look more native (even if it won’t be native) so that your users are not confused.

With Xojo you don’t have to worry about any of that. Instead you can just check a few boxes to get native apps for each OS you want. When you Build your project you’ll get a separate folder containing a native app for each OS platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi). Simply transfer the app to the OS and run it without having to worry about installing additional run-time libraries or even packaging. This is about as easy as it gets.

If you need cross-platform desktop apps and are looking at Visual Studio for Mac, you should definitely also consider Xojo. Xojo brings most of the same features to the table, but in a way that is much easier to use and dramatically easier to deploy.

If you haven’t yet, Download 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.

After the 15-minute download and installation process, where I was asked for my admin password three times, the first thing that surprised me is that Visual Studio for Mac is a bit limited in how it can create desktop apps. Although it can technically create two types of desktop apps (cross-platform desktop apps using Gtk# and native Cocoa Mac apps), it cannot create native Windows, Linux or Raspberry Pi desktop apps.

Since Visual Studio for Mac is just a rebranded Xamarin Studio, I was able to find a tutorial on the Xamarin site called “Hello, Mac” that shows you how to create a simple Mac Cocoa app with a button and a label. When the button is clicked, the label displays the number of times it has been clicked.

I should warn you: it is very long and frankly a bit complicated for such a simple app. In particular I was surprised that Visual Studio for Mac does not have a built-in layout editor to design your Mac app’s UI. You have to use Xcode for that and then make sure its changes synchronize back with Visual Studio for Mac. All in all, it took me about 20 minutes, minus interruptions.

If, like me, you’ve used Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio for Mac you might be wondering how this compares to making the same app in Xojo. Here’s how to make that same app in Xojo:

Hello, Mac

Start by downloading and installing Xojo.

1. Launch Xojo and click “Desktop” in the Project Chooser. For Application Name use “HelloMac”. Click OK.

You are now looking at the Xojo Workspace window. You’ll be doing all your development in this window and won’t need to switch to another tool at any point.

On the left you can see the Navigator which has the default components for a desktop project: App, Window1 and MainMenuBar with Window1 already selected and its window layout displayed in the Layout Editor in the center of the screen. Unlike Visual Studio for Mac, Xojo has a built-in Layout Editor for designing your Mac UI so you won’t have to jump over to Xcode to create the layout.

2. On the right you’ll see the Library of controls. From there, drag a Button and a Label positioned like this:
3. Click on the Button and then click on the Inspector button in the toolbar (top right) to show the properties. Change the Name to “ClickButton” and the Caption to “Click Me”.
4. Click on the Label and change the Name to “ClickLabel” and the Text to “The button has not yet been clicked.” For the Label you’ll also want to check the right-hand lock in the Locking section so that the label grows and shrinks as you resize the window.

You are now done with the layout and can move on to the code.

5. To track the number of clicks you’ll want to add a property. Click the “+” button on the Layout Editor command bar and select Property. Give it the name “NumberOfTimesClicked”. Leave the Type as Integer.
6. The last thing to add is the code to increase the click count and display the count in the label when the button is clicked. Click on Window1 to go back to the window Layout Editor and double-click on ClickButton to show the Event Handler window. Click on Action and then OK. This displays a blank Code Editor where you’ll put this code to run when the button is clicked:

NumberOfTimesClicked = NumberOfTimesClicked + 1

Dim buttonText As Text = "The button has been clicked {0} time{1}."
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{0}", NumberOfTimesClicked.ToText)
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{1}", If(NumberOfTimesClicked > 1, "s", ""))
ClickLabel.Text = buttonText

The Xojo programming language resembles Visual Basic, but has an OOP model that is similar to C#.

You should now save your project.

Testing

To test your project and test the app, just click the big Run button on the toolbar. Click the button to see the label get updated.

Although this is a ridiculously simple app and is really designed just to give you a quick feel for the development environment, it should be pretty obvious that Xojo is much, much simpler to use than Visual Studio for Mac when it comes to creating Mac desktop apps. There is less overhead and you don’t have to use Xcode at all.

But Xojo has one other huge advantage when it comes to desktop apps: you can just click a button or two to get native apps for other platforms! Go back to Xojo and look at the Navigator and the section called “Build Settings”.

There you can check the boxes for “Windows” and “Linux” to also build this project as native apps for both Windows and Linux in addition to Mac. Just transfer the files over and they’ll run as is because they do not rely on any external frameworks.

This capability is a tremendous time-saver and is a major reason why so many people choose Xojo to make cross-platform desktop apps. If Visual Studio for Mac is something that interests you, then you should definitely be considering Xojo so that you can make truly cross-platform desktop apps faster than you ever thought possible.