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Xojo 2021r2 released

The latest Xojo release arrived this morning and you may be impressed by the number of bug fixes. The Xojo community complained the last year about quality problems in Xojo frameworks and the rush to market for Web 2. Some API 2 related changes and the confusion was perfect.

And yes, Xojo Inc. listened. They scheduled more time to fix bugs and refine the framework classes. Several of the bigger projects in work (see roadmap) got pushed back. And a lot of work went into fixing issues related to version tracking. The IDE should now better track what changed and write it to disk. This should avoid repeated changes showing up in version tracking.

For each project, you may do a one time cleanup. Make a new IDE script, put in the command DirtyAllProjectItems and run it. Then save the project and commit the changes to version tracking. From that point on you should no longer see properties switching between e.g. "true" and true, like sometimes having quotes and sometimes not.

On the bugs fixed, well it includes feedback case 64456 - JSONItem ToString leaks memory, which I reported there after looking for leaks in the web project. Also I am happy for the String.Compare leak got fixed.

The list of changes includes a couple of new things, but most of them may also be handled as bug fixes. At least for the macOS universal builds steps I would count it as bug that the post scripts run twice, which is now changed to run once.

On new things added, we got some new PDF methods in Xojo including iOS support. But we sill recommend everyone to try MBS Xojo DynaPDF Plugin instead, which is currently available with OmegaBundle. The binary option for enumeration lets you do flags, where each value has a different bit in the integer value. The Xojo Cloud servers can now send iOS push notifications to Apple's servers and then deliver them to your iOS application.

In introduction of a bug fix release like Apple did with Snow Leopard for macOS is a great idea. With over 200 fixes (including fixes labeled as changes), this is a huge improvement for the Xojo community. Maybe Xojo Inc. could do that every year like a summer release for bug fixes and do bigger new features into spring and fall releases. Like Linux for example switches between bug fix and new feature release.

MBS Xojo Plugins in current versions should work just fine.
22 07 21 - 15:36