This question isnt asked that often. But I think it should be.
When you create classes, modules, layouts or anything else in Xojo you should make everything as private as it needs to be. And no more. And as public as it needs to be. And no more.
But exactly what does that mean ?
I would say that you should normally start with most things in classes being protected.… Read the rest
After writing the post about stable sorts I ported a version of stable quicksort to Xojo and have now posted it on GitHub
Often you want to sort into alphabetical order or numerical order. And there are various ways to accomplish this.
But what if you need to sort first numerically and then alphabetically and maybe several other additional criteria ? How does this affect the overall result ?
It might be nice to make it so that the second sort doesn’t break the ordering the first sort did.… Read the rest
A question I was asked recently posed an interesting question about exceptions and the cost of using them as a general error handling mechanism.
Xojo uses whats know as “zero cost exception handling”. Essentially at runtime there is no penalty for having exception handling in place. It imposes no runtime overhead when NO exceptions are encountered.… Read the rest
Something I never really gave much thought about made me do a bit of a double take today.
If you assign a color literal to a color variable you get what might look like “funny” behaviour when compared to other types of variables.
For instance, if you do
Dim c As Color = &c12345what you get in the color is the color value &c12345000, a right zero fill, instead of &c00012345, a left zero fill.… Read the rest
On the forum there was a suggestion that a person should use a container control that had a few controls embedded in it at design time. And then when using that container control that they should skip providing an API that the container presented and just reach inside the container and manipulate the controls it contain directly.… Read the rest
Windows have two sets of properties that all relate to positioning a window.
However, they are not all quite created equally.
There are, of course, the typical top, left, width and height properties. And also the “bounds” property which is a Rect.
If you examine the bounds property for a Document window, and the top, left, width and height you will find that the Bounds.top… Read the rest
One of the things that Xojo lacks is the notion of generics.
So what are these things and why would they be useful ?
In many programming languages you might want to define a class that behaves like a List. But you want to be able to make this generic enough that when you go to use one you can make a List of Strings, a List of Classes, a List of controls etc.… Read the rest
Suppose you have the need to create a custom control like I did recently
One of the things that you should do so people do not get confused about using your control is to “implement” any events in whatever you use as your base class that should not be exposed to end users of your control.… Read the rest
My CSV Parser is now on github
If there are others you’d like to see on github send me an email, or comment and I’ll get them posted.