Many many years ago when REALbasic first wrote the IDE in REALbasic it was said

“We’re also ‘eating our own dog food,’” said Perlman. Previous releases of REALbasic were coded using the C++ language, although with REALbasic 5.5, the last significant update, the groundwork was laid to add pieces that were written in REALbasic. When REALbasic 2005 is released, the entire Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will have been recoded in REALbasic itself.

“That has some benefits for our customers, most of them indirect” said Perlman. The engineers who are developing REALbasic are now having an experience more in line with their customers’ own experience, which gives them a better sense of what does and doesn’t work.

https://www.macworld.com/article/174461/realbasic-45.html

The various API changes made over the past 2+ years should be treated the same. They fundamentally change users experience. When Xojo’s team isn’t using the same API’s day in day out that users are the disconnect is as if they are writing in a completely different language.

As of Oct 18, 2021

Closed (Already exists) 7
Closed (By Design) 45
Closed (duplicate) 48
Closed (Misc) 31
Closed (No Longer Reproducible) 2
Closed (Not Actionable) 7
Closed (Not Reproducible) 44
Closed (Won’t Implement) 8
Fixed 8
Fixed & Verified 107
Implemented 1
Implemented & Verified 15
Needs Review 10
Reproducible 176
Resolved 2
Reviewed 217
Verified 32

Overall 435 Open cases

Recently I had both Christian Schmitz and one of my clients from Germany visit

Christian and I spent his first full day in Canada touring about to the Royal Tyrell Museum and some of the sights on thee way out. Weather was crappy so we didnt spend a lot of time outside.

At the end of the day we got together with several other Xojo users at a local restaurant and enjoyed a nice meal and discussions around all kinds of things.

Thank you so much for your time, wisdom and good humor 🙂

nothing else needs to be said

Last night the northern lights were out in full force.
Walked to the end of the deck and WOW !
We took some pictures but they didnt come out nearly as nicely as the ones my youngest took (like this)

Truly an awesome display

Code reuse is an admirable goal for any developer.

Being able to re-use well written well tested code is a good thing.

Especially if you can reuse it across multiple facets of one project, or across several projects.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people start out reusing code using copy paste from one place to another.

However, copy paste isn’t usually a well regarded code reuse technique.

Why not ? Stack overflow wrote a blog about the reasons. You might copy & paste someone else’ insecure code into your projects and thereby introduce security vulnerabilities. That’s certainly a possibility.

But what if you’re just copying & pasting your own code around ? Where’s the harm ?

Suppose you have some code you really think is top notch. And you want to reuse it over & over. Suppose you want to reuse it in the event handler of numerous controls across several projects in Xojo.

And sometime later you find there’s a bug in it.

Now how many places do you have to fix in one project ? Or worse across many projects ?

This is where copy paste as a code reuse technique can cause you extra work.

You have to find & fix all that code in every project you’ve used it in.

I’ve been using externals in SVN (yes I still use SVN)

And in every project that uses these shared modules its a simple “update” and they have all the latest code from all the shared items.

Git has similar capabilities.

Some time ago Bob had said he would let the domain registration for BKeeney Briefs lapse. Today it finally came home to roost.

Trying to visit gets you one of several things.

What I got was a domain name squatter site trying to sell me the name.

Sad to see that finally happen but with Bob’s employment changing from contractor to full time employee its not surprising.

And, with this change, another one bites the dust somehow seems strangely appropriate.

Thanks for everything Bob !

Was tracking down a bug in my app and couldnt figure out what was wrong initially.

All the code seemed right but setting a value to code like

value = string.ToInteger

seemed to be the culprit. Sure enough the string contained a value like 3.0e+2 (an integer expressed in exponential form) But the docs say

String.ToInteger

Method

Returns the integer equivalent of the source string. This function is the same as the Val function but is international-savvy.

But experience was telling me this wasnt true

So a quick test in 2021r2.1 with

Dim s As String = "3.0e+2"

Dim i1 As Int32 = Val(s)
Dim i2 As Int32 = s.Val
Dim i3 As Int32 = s.ToInteger

Break

shows that indeed i1 = 300, i2 = 300, and i3 is 3 not 300 like I would have expected. I changed my use of ToInteger to Val and things work as expected.

Be careful out there

EDIT : reported bug http://feedback.xojo.com/case/65567

If youre one of the people who didnt get the Xojo Experience survey there’s one thats a lot alike at INN

On the forums someone is looking for a way to identify what kind of file they are dealing with. And then a way to “sort” knowing those types.

The suggestion given is to look at each extension in a simple way

But, you can get away without ever having to look at the extension. Folderitem already assigns a TYPE IF there is a filetype defined that matches.

You can use this built in ability to do many things.

I posted about this on INN along with a sample project