Thomas Templemann wrote a nice blog post about his preferred coding style guidelines.
And most I absolutely agree with.
Except one.
His suggested style is to test booleans simply for the value they hold and not to test for TRUE or FALSE explicitly. He considers testing for TRUE or FALSE bad style. Examples of bad style are :
if hidden = true then ...Currently when you call a method in Xojo the parameters are matched up starting from the first to the last from left to right. They are matched up based on their position in the argument list.
One thing some other languages support is “named parameters”.
What this allows is a certain degree of flexibility that doesn’t exist with positional parameters like Xojo uses.… Read the rest
For anyone not using version control perhaps the easiest way to share code between various projects is to use external items. However, not everything cam be made external. Modules that contain classes & other modules cant be shared via external items.
So how can you share these ?
On macOS the answer is … ALIASES !!!!!… Read the rest
Back when I wrote Code for Safety I gave one example of something that I’m sure we’ve all done from time to time. Saving the state of some flag and then returning and having possibly multiple places to reset the flag we saved.
There’s another thats is more common with the advent of HiDPI support for Windows; drawing in a listbox event like CellBackGroundPaint Saving the graphics state, disabling antialiasing, and then needing to restore that state.… Read the rest
When you create a custom control from a canvas, container control or some other base class its not unusual to use raise event to create new events like “BeforeButtonPressed”, “AfterButtonPressed” or to just make it so you;r control can implement normal events like Open, Close, etc and pass then along.
You’ll see code using raiseevent to cause these events to be raised on any instances.… Read the rest
A lot of times when you need to create a menu at runtime you don’t know the number of items and those items may require some additional data to be handled correctly like a folder item, window reference etc. And in cases like this a subclass of MenuItem makes sense so you can add properties to the subclass and implement the action event to handle that extra data.… Read the rest
One of the things that transitioning from the old Classic framework, which was based on Carbon and HIToolbox, to Cocoa brought about was changes to lots of controls. Bevel buttons fall into that boat and now with the support of Dark Mode they look awful – because bevel buttons are based on an old style control that has no modern equivalent in 64 bit Cocoa.… Read the rest
No. Not at my place 😛
Sometimes you NEED to test your app and whatever remediation you have put in place and need a reliable way to make your app crash
Here it is
Dim p As ptr
p.Byte(0) = 123
Those two lines. Insert them anywhere you might put normal code and book your app will crash.… Read the rest
An interesting question posed by a relatively new user came up on the forums. It had to do with how the Array() function worked and how he could force it to return an array of variants to call his method.
His method was defined like
BuildMenu( base as menuitem, params() as variant)
And he would call it like
Result = BuildMenu (base, Array ("Run", False, "Edit", "Rename", "Delete") )
and this would build up a menu from the base item and append menu items to it.… Read the rest
In a different forum a user reminded me of a speed tip that had cropped up once or twice over the years. It has to do with popupmenus.
Basically on older versions of macOS if you did
PopupMenu1.ListIndex = -1
For i As Integer = 0 To 1000
PopupMenu1.AddRow Str(i)
NextThis behaved not so badly although there is a slightly faster variation
But on Mojave this is noticeably slow.… Read the rest