But I’m entitled to …

When I give code away, for free, I’ve probably already invested a bit of time in it. How much time I’ve invested will vary depending on why I originally created whatever it is I’m giving away.

And often I will update the code. Sometimes to meet my own needs. Sometimes to meet a clients needs. And sometimes the code just sits for a long time without getting updated or touched.… Read the rest

Bevelbutton redux

At the end of June I posted about a replacement for the bevel button that I’d created.

Since then I’ve had some feedback and some updates & fixes submitted for it and a newer versions has been posted.

If you’ve used it in your projects you might want to grab the latest version.

Delegates

The Xojo docs about delegates are quite sparse about what you can or cannot do with them and whether they can or cannot take certain kinds of parameters. What they do say is that

A Delegate data type is an object representing a specific method. It is a function pointer with a method signature.

I was recently asked if a delegate that did not make use of any external dynamic library could take an object parameter.… Read the rest

EmbeddedWindowControl

If you’ve ever used a container control on a layout and then tried to manipulate the controls at runtime with code like


For i As Integer = 0 To Self.ControlCount - 1
  Dim ctrl As Control = Self.Control(i)  
  // now manipulate this control or call its methods
Next

you’ve probably run into the EmbeddedWindowControl

Its what you get when you use a Container Control on a layout either by placing one at design time or dynamically adding one at runtime.… Read the rest

Universal Project : II

In a previous article I detailed some of the things I’d like to see the IDE do to make it so a “Universal Project” that could, from a single source code base, produce one, or more, compiled applications.

The up side to this would be that if you have a suite of related applications the code that is common between them, perhaps business specific logic, would only need to be altered in one place and could immediately be tested across all the related apps much more simply than by using external items, SVN externals, or the Git equivalent.… Read the rest

The Universal project

It’s long been a desire of Xojo users to have a single project thay they can open and compile a desktop app, web app, iOS app and console apps from the same project.

This would make it so if you have a suite of related applications that all use common code sharing that common code would be easier since its all in the same project and just by selecting a different target in the build settings you could compile whichever one you selected.… Read the rest

Leaky abstractions and how to plug some

Every once in a while you run into some code that tries to present a fairly abstract API to some class / module. Maybe this is in your own code or in code you have received from some other source.

But as you work with it you find that the abstraction reveals internal implementation details that really should not be known outside the class.… Read the rest