XDC 2014 just 4 months away

Today is last day to get the $200 discount on the ticket price. So today: $750 per ticket.
If you fly from Frankfurt/Main to Las Vegas directly, you can use Condor for around 730 Euro non stop!

Registration started for the Xojo Developer Conference 2014 in Monte Carlo Resort and Casino. So you can already take the chance to reserve your seat. Be sure to take advantage of the early bird offer: $750 until November, 30 2013. Regular price is $950.
Also the hotel has an excellent rate. Looks like it's $69 for some days, but if you stay a week you are at about $77 in average.

The Xojo developer conference is the biggest event in the year for Xojo developers. Usually there are about 100 guests, but maybe this time a few more due to being in Las Vegas? See you there next year!

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr9

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Changed PNG library to return warning on invalid SRGB ICC Profile instead of error.
  • Fixed bugs with NSMutableParagraphStyleMBS class.
  • Fixed bug in NSParagraphStyleMBS.tabStops.
  • Added new constructor to EyeOnePro4MBS class to create instance for just watching for events without talking to a specific device.
  • Updated EyeOnePro4MBS class for i1Pro SDK 4.1.2.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Black Friday Sales

After Thanks Giving a lot of companies do give some discounts. So currently you can benefit from this Xojo related offers:
Also we have a Complete + DynaPDF bundle where you get 30% on the bundle. Our DynaPDF licenses can be used with our Xojo, Real Studio and FileMaker plugins as well as in C, Visual Basic, Delphi and PHP. And discount is also valid for upgrading licenses or adding up to 5 years of updates.

French Xojo Developer meeting in Paris, 17th January 2014

Bonjour,
La prochaine réunion du groupe xFR aura lieu le vendredi 17 janvier 2014 de 8 h 30 à 17 h à Paris.<trans.gif>

Avant la Xojo Developer Conference, il est temps de se réunir. Pour cela, je vous propose une journée d’information/formation autour de RealStudio le 17 janvier prochain. Cette journée aura lieu à Paris

Réserver déjà la date dans votre agenda afin de pouvoir assister à la 3é réunion information/formation sur Xojo. Le planning prévisionnel n’est pas encore disponible et sera publié rapidement.

Je vous rappelle que c’est une occasion unique de rencontrer d’autre développeur de Xojo. De plus, Stéphane PINEL, de Xojo Inc , sera présent pour vous présenter les prochaines nouveautés.

Pour assurer une meilleure organisation, une participation de 35 euros par personne est demandée pour participer à cette réunion. Un accès WIFI sera disponible sur place. La conférence est en français

Vous déjà réserver votre place ici: eventbrite.fr/e/billets-reunion-xfr-paris-utilisateur-xojo-9292134023

Stéphane THIROUX, xojo-fr.com

PS: MBS will not be present on this event.

More keyboard shortcuts for Xojo, please

As professional developers we use Xojo daily to write our cross platform apps. Compared to Real Studio IDE some actions still need longer, especially moving the whole mouse cursor from one edge of the screen to another. So for the next releases, we would appreciate a few new shortcuts. If you have ideas, please add your comments to these cases and point us to more interesting cases.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr8

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Added JSONMBS.SuffixObject method.
  • Added JPEG 2000 support for GraphicsMagick on Mac OS X and Linux (was already there on Windows).
  • Added StyledText.RTFDataMBS as replacement for built-in RTFData property.
  • Added TextArea.RTFDataMBS and NSTextViewMBS.RTFData properties to get/set RTF data on Mac OS X.
  • Added some more TwainMBS properties.
  • Improved GetVariantArrayUboundMBS and GetVariantArrayValueMBS functions to handle more array types inside a variant.
  • Added BarcodeGeneratorMBS.ShowText property.
  • Added more CIFilters for Mac OS X 10.9.
  • Added private constructor for CGImageMBS and a couple of create functions.
  • Added more events to IKImageEditPanelMBS class.
  • Cleaned up some variant handling code. In most places we now also process now Currency, WString, CString, PString and CFStringRef variants correctly.
  • Added SQLPreparedStatementMBS.kTypeNumeric. Depending on the variant you pass, we either use Int64 or Double internally.
  • Added CF methods to CFImageSourceMBS and CGImageDestinationMBS classes so you can avoid extra conversion between CFDictionary and Xojo Dictionary.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Xojo developer meeting

Are you close to Birmingham UK and have time tomorrow?

Be sure to spend your evening with us in Jimmy's Spices (Regency Wharf, Broad Street, Birmingham).
This is easy to find as it's just on the back of the Hyatt hotel tower.
Dinner buffet is 15 pounds, so please come hungry.

Not sure when other people come, but you may find me there at 7pm.

PS: Also visit the Christmas fair here in Birmingham. It's a german style christmas market with lots of goodies and german specialties where there is no english name.

Waiting for 64bit

For years we are waiting now for 64bit support in both Xojo and FileMaker. And I get plenty of people asking for features to be added to plugins which will only work once we have 64bit support:
  • Use newer Mac OS X frameworks like MapKit, EventKit, Social, Accounts and others. All the new goodies from Apple require apps which use 64bit.
  • Use more memory, e.g. raster huge poster PDFs in dynaPDF to 300 dpi bitmaps which easily needs more than 4 GB of memory.
  • Use newer VLC library with our MBS VLC Plugin. With version 2.1 VLC is 64bit only, so we can't load the libraries.
  • On Linux with 64bit, we need to install 32 bit compatibility libraries. But not every lib is available there, so some things will not work.
  • For database access (e.g. ODBC drivers), we already face the problem, that often 64bit only library comes by default and users have trouble getting 32bit one installed. Especially if people have 64bit Windows and create a ODBC data source with 64bit driver and our 32 bit app does not see it.
  • Use faster 64 bit math. But both in Xojo and FileMaker this will not make a big difference as number crunching is normally not a bottleneck in our solutions.
So we do hope FileMaker and Xojo will get this done next year and provide us with a stable 64bit version of their software, so we can add all this nice features.

PS: FileMaker 12 has already a 64bit server for CWP.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr7

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Added CipherMBS and DigestMBS using OpenSSL and various algorithms.
  • Added AccessibilityMBS.MakeAXValueFromCFRange function.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Xojo Event, Birmingham UK 21-22nd November

Dear all,

The UK Xojo event of the year is only a few days away!

If you haven't signed up, there are a few places left for the training day by Christian Schmitz on Thursday 21st November. Christian is certainly the most respected and well-known Xojo developer in Europe, who is always pleased to help. His training sessions are excellent and are not to be missed.

There are also a few places still available for the networking event on Friday 22nd November. Xojo developers in the UK find our annual event valuable for getting to know other experienced Xojo developers that can help with technical issues and advice. Feedback about the events has always been positive and the quality of the presentations is high.
  • Eric Gibbon, MacTasks - Welcome, Introductions and Xojo Developer Networking
  • Richard Duke, ArtScene - Succeeding in Business Using Xojo
  • Christian Schmitz, Monkeybread - Monkeybread plugins
  • Tom Catchesides, Light Blue Software - Building Databases for Consumer Applications
  • Hamish Symington, Light Blue Software
  • Geoff Perlman, CEO, Xojo Inc. In the afternoon we will also have a video chat and special demonstration of the latest from Xojo with Geoff Perman of Xojo Inc. Get the latest Xojo news and your questions answered straight from the man at the top!
And don't forget the socialising! There are get-togethers on the evenings of Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st November. These are very useful gatherings, you can get a lot of information and help while having fun, eating some great food, and having a drink or two.

Please go to xojo-events-uk-eorg.eventbrite.co.uk for more information and to register. Don't miss out! I hope to see you there.

Best wishes,
Eric Gibbon

DynaPDF Christmas Sale

DynaForms runs a DynaPDF sale for Christmas:

We wish all our customers Merry Christmas and a successful new year.
As a thank you for the past 11 years, you get 30% Christmas discount
on everything till the end of the year.

For orders by invoice or Paypal, we apply the discount automatically. For orders through Share-it, please use the coupon code DynaPDF. Also take the chance to order updates and upgrades with this discount. We can sell updates up to 5 years in advance if you like. And of course licenses are per developer, so if you got a new coworker, you can now use the discount for a new license.

Please check our latest plugins. With 13.5pr6 Xojo and Real Studio plugins you can even add vector graphics barcodes to your PDFs. And if you like to use reporting in Xojo, you can also check out BKeeney Shorts. There you can use our DynaPDF Plugin for PDF output.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr6

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Added ZintRender* classes so you can do vector drawing for barcode generator.
  • Fixed bug in SQL plugin with setting text parameter to SQLite prepared statement.
  • Added ExtendedAttributesMBS.LastErrorMessage.
  • Added WMIObjectMBS.LasterrorMessage.
  • Added some more drag and drop functions for Mac OS X 10.6 (e.g. draggingSourceOperationMaskForLocal event, dragImage method).
  • Added NSWindowControllerMBS class.
  • Updated functions returning windows error messages to use Unicode.
  • Added EncodingNameMBS and TextEncoding.InternetNameMBS functions.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Barcode Generation or Recognition

Did you try recent 13.5pr5 plugin for Xojo & Real Studio?
We have BarcodeGeneratorMBS class to generate a barcode and also the zxing classes to recognize like in this example:
Sub Open() // init generator and encode a Hello World dim g as new BarcodeGeneratorMBS g.Symbology = g.BarcodeQrcode g.BorderWidth = 5 g.Scale = 2 g.Encode "Hello World" // get the barcode and show in window dim p as Picture = g.Picture window1.Backdrop = p // and now recognize it dim b as zxingBinaryBitmapMBS = zxingBinaryBitmapMBS.CreateWithPicture(p) dim x as new zxingQRCodeReaderMBS dim result as zxingResultMBS = x.decode(b) dim bf as zxingBarcodeFormatMBS = result.BarcodeFormat // shows QR_CODE: Hello World MsgBox bf.Name+": "+result.Text Exception r as zxingExceptionMBS MsgBox r.message End Sub

PS: Barcode detection is also coming for our MBS FileMaker plugin.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr5

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Added new Barcode plugin.
  • Added BarcodeGeneratorMBS class.
  • Added zxing classes for barcode recognition.
  • Added NetmaskIPv4 and NetmaskIPv6 to NetworkInterfacesMBS and a new merge option to not merge entries.
  • Added passCIImage property to QTCaptureDecompressedVideoOutputMBS and changed LastFrame property and videoFrame parameter to variant.
  • Updated CoreWLAN classes with new methods, constants and properties.
  • Added NSBitmapImageRepMBS.CGImage.
  • Added WindowsQOSMBS class.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr4

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Fixed AVFoundation plugin loading. (broken in pr3)
  • Fixed bug with SQL Plugin when reading blob values. (introduced in pr3).
  • Added new constructor for NSLocaleNumberMBS and NSLocaleDateMBS class taking NSLocaleMBS.
  • Fixed Tiff plugin to load even when no Visual Studio 2008 runtime for Windows is installed.
  • Added more checks for SQL Plugin to raise exceptions if SQL commands or option names are empty, connection or command objects are nil when passed as parameter.
  • Now loading CURL on demand in CURLMBS class on Mac and Linux to avoid hard linking it.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

xDev Magazine Issue 11.6

The November/December 2013 (11.6) issue of xDev Magazine is now available.
Here's a quick preview of what's inside:
  • What's New in R3? * by Marc Zeedar
    Wary of the newest update? You shouldn't be. It's a definite improvement.
  • Code Smarter * by Trisha Duke
    Trisha shares tips from her XDC talk last spring.
  • MBS Conference Report * by Bill Kearney
    What happened at the MBS Xojo Conference in Germany in September.
  • The Apple About Box * by Sam Rowlands
    Using an official Apple About Box is easy and saves you time.
  • ChartPart 3.0 * by Kevin Cully
    ChartPart broke with Xojo, but Kevin fixed it for you.
  • Creating Xojo Plugins * by Matt Gardner
    Creating plugins for Xojo with XCode: a step-by-step guide.
Plus: Unit Testing, path enumeration, inheritance versus interfaces, regular expressions, more!

Windows DLL trouble

Today I spend some time working on issues with Windows and DLLs.
First did you see dialog like this complaining about missing EncodePointer function?

This tells you that your Real Studio / Xojo app requires Windows XP with SP2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or something newer. You can fix by updating your Windows version or using an older Real Studio version to build the app. (2011r1 works, 2012r2 not)
EncodePointer is used by Visual Studio 2010 runtime to add some security to pointers used in the runtime.

Next did you see this dialog?

This tells you our Tiff plugin needs Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 libraries.
You can download from Microsoft and install them:

Which does fix the problem.

But also for next plugin version we changed the Tiff plugin to no longer depend on this specific version of Visual C++ runtimes. We can do that because all plugins come with static runtime. So having the plugin DLL reference a runtime DLL which is not used does not make sense. We removed the dependency and the issue is fixed.
Actually I never saw the issue before, because VMWare's driver package installs 2008 runtimes already.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 13.5pr3

New in this prerelease of the 13.5 plugins:
  • Updated SQLAPI++ 4.1.2.
  • Added Trace events to SQLCommandMBS, SQLConnectionMBS and SQLGlobalsMBS.
  • First plugins build with Mac OS X 10.9.
  • Dropped NSMailDelivery and Apple80211framework plugin part.
  • Added MDQueryMBS.Results function.
  • Added yield parameters to Picture.BlurMBS, Picture.DrawPictureFMBS and Picture.ScalingMBS.
  • Fixed bug with GraphicsImporter plugin initialization on Windows.
  • Fixed bug in writing zip archives on Windows with ZipFileMBS. Archives were bloated/corrupt.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
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