Author: Norman Palardy

Xojo makes it possible for anyone to create custom controls for their projects. And its not really that hard. Yet many people don’t bother to take advantage of this capability and then try to place many independent instances on a layout and make several controls behave as though they are a single control.

This quick tutorial is aimed at trying to convince you that it really is worth investing the little bit of time required to create your own custom controls and then reuse them as many times as you want.… Read the rest

There are a LOT of things that you will hav a hard time doing if you only ever add instances of controls from the Library in Xojo to your layouts. And you will spend a LOT of time trying to sort out how to beat them into submission to do what you want with some combination of handling the events, properties and methods on your layout.… Read the rest

A recent discussion lead to an odd question. Why do you need to subclass things in Xojo ? Whats the point since they give you all these great controls and classes ? What would make you WANT to subclass things instead of just implementing the events of the existing controls ?

I was sort of surprised at this.… Read the rest

I asked this on the forums and the post was promptly deleted so I’ll ask here.

This is an unscientific survey.

Answer if you feel inclined to. Emails are optional.

EDIT : updated with stats as they exist up to today – Jan 17, 2020
Amazingly the percentages have remained fairly stable as more replies are added.… Read the rest

Xojo supports the use of exceptions and the error handling machnisms that makes possible.

in order to use exceptions effectively you need to use a language feature called a Try block. It has several parts to it. First there is the initial TRY statement which opens a new scope level AND delimits where the TRY block starts.… Read the rest

Recently I re-read The Pragmatic Programmer mostly while on a break in Mexico. I also did my fair share of sitting in the sun, eating and event drinking but I read a LOT as well.

And I keep learning, or at least reminding myself, of several things I think are really useful to all of us.… Read the rest

I started up Xojo 2019r3 the other day and changed some colors while tracking down a nifty dark mode bug (see http://feedback.xojo.com/case/58695)

And after that all versions of Xojo would, when starting, immediately show the color picker panel like this :

Now lets be clear – I dont consider this to be a Xojo bug.… Read the rest

This is so annoying. I have no bluetooth mouse powered on but I do have a USB one and it works fine. And the mouse control panel says it cannot find it so I cannot change the tracking speed. System Report knows there’s a mouse connected as you can see.

Turn the bluetooth mouse on and the panel finds that and now I can adjust the tracking speed.… Read the rest

A good question on the discord server I participate in prompted a good question. It started with IS and = are just synonyms right?

It turns out that MOST times this may be true. But not always. And that little “but not always” can get you in trouble if you dont know when the difference is important.… Read the rest

It is my blog and this is something I’ve been working at for months.

I PASSED my on snow certifications for the Canadian Ski Patrol and now get to do a few shifts working with more senior patrollers before they turn me loose and I can patrol on my own !

What an awesome way to spend New Years Day !!!!!!… Read the rest