Windows, Xojo and the Clipboard

You may know that we have a few clipboard dedicated classes in our Xojo plugins.

WindowsClipboardMBS for Windows to get/set data.
NSPasteboardMBS for Cocoa apps.
ClipboardMBS for older Carbon apps.

Now Xojo’s move to DirectDraw in 2016r4 and subsequent changes in 2017r1 and 2017r2, we had to adjust our plugins to keep working on Windows. So for next plugin version we include fixes to our SetPicture and GetPicture functions to correctly put a bitmap on the clipboard. Our plugin can get/set the bitmaps to the clipboard now in 32 and 64bit.

The clipboard can hold several data types and Windows defines a couple of standard formats. Beside the bitmap type, there is a DIB type for a device independent bitmap and Metafile Picture for vector graphics. Normally Windows should convert from DIB to BITMAP or back.

Still some applications like Excel or Word look for the DIB and the conversion from BITMAP doesn’t work well. So we added new SetDIB/GetDIB functions to put a Xojo picture on the clipboard in the DIB format. This should solve problems people may have with clipboard.

If you like to try the newer plugins, please do not hesitate to contact us. The biggest plugin in space...