RTF functions in MBS Plugins

We have a lot of RTF related functions in MBS Xojo Plugins:

Our RTF extension to the Xojo StyledText class is great to speed up loading and saving of StyledText objects. If the styled text belongs to a (Desktop)TextArea, you may use our RTFDataMBS or WinRTFDataMBS functions directly to load and save RTF data. The functions use the OS functions, so they support more styles and font options.

For example if you use WinShowFontPanelMBS to show the Windows font panel or NSFontPanelMBS class for macOS, you may get more font styles than what Xojo supports directly, e.g. double underlined.

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Three months until the Xojo Developer Conference

Just three months left until the XDC 2023 in London, England. Tickets are still available for $525 USD.

It will be held April 26-28, 2023 in London, England at the Hilton London Euston. This conferences is the best place to meet Xojo developers from around the world in real live, make contacts, present yourself as expert and learn what is new in Xojo. Tickets are available in the Xojo store and if you bring your partner, you can order an extra guest ticket for the dinner events.

Check out the conference highlights video if you want to see what it's like - or ask one of the many attendees from the forum!

Wether you are full or part time Xojo developer, this is your chance to learn all about the Web 2.0 framework, the Android progress and what's new in the Xojo world. The first sessions are already listed, so check the list.

To get there, please use public transportation. The piccadilly line brings you right from Heathrow Airport to Russell Square Station, near the hotel. That trip should cost about 3 £ and you may just pay by tap in/out with your NFC enabled credit card or phone. Otherwise buy an Oyster card and load money on it if you don't have such a card. If you come by Eurostar train through the tunnel from France, you can exit Pancras station and just walk to the hotel.

See you soon there!

News from the MBS Xojo Plugins in Version 23.0

In this article I want to introduce you the new functionalities from the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 23.0.

Linux 64-bit for ARM

We added Linux 64-bit plugin support for our plugins.

Please try and let us know if something broke on the way as we plan to improve our support for Linux 64-bit on ARM for the upcoming releases.

As you see on the screenshots, the ChartDirector and Scintilla control works fine.

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MonkeyBread Software Releases the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 23.0

Nickenich, Germany - (January 17th, 2023) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce MBS Xojo Plugins 23.0 for macOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin collection currently available for Xojo. MBS Xojo Plugins have been updated and now includes over 3000 classes and 80,000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:

Since you can build your applications for Linux 64-bit ARM target with Xojo 2022r4, we now include the support for this in our plugins. All plugins are now build for the new target, but not all plugins parts work. We updated Scintilla and ChartDirector plugins to work, but e.g. for LibXL we wait for the next version to include Linux 64-bit ARM support.

Our MongoDB plugin got a new MongoChangeStreamMBS class to provide a stream of changes in a database. This may help you to audit changes on the database and check what changes you or others do on the database.

The updated CURL plugin includes functions for web sockets. This includes the new CURLSWebSocketFrameMBS class for receiving a message and WebSocketReceive and WebSocketSend methods to CURLSMBS class. If you use SetupAWS, you may now do so with PATCH requests. The OptionConnectOnly property is now an integer as required for using with web sockets. The CURLSVersionMBS class can report protocols and features as string arrays.

The new CallDelegateCrashSafeMBS module provides a way to run a method, which may normally crash your application. Instead of a crash, we raise an exception and you can catch it and react on it.

The new WindowsThreadExecutionStateMBS class can help to block display or computer from sleeping while your application performs a longer operation. The TimerMBS class got updated to create yielding timers, which can help to keep threads running while menus are used on Windows.

With the update of the barcode generator, we got new WhitespaceHeight, GuardDescent and WarnLevel properties for BarcodeGeneratorMBS class.

Our Bluetooth LE classes for Windows got an update. With the new WindowsGattSessionMBS class you can manage a session for a connection to a Bluetooth device. The new FromIdAsync shared method in WindowsBluetoothLEDeviceMBS and WindowsGattDeviceServiceMBS classes can create an object for a given device ID. We added several GUIDs methods for WindowsGattCharacteristicMBS and WindowsGattDeviceServiceMBS classes.

We updated our Core Image filter classes for macOS Ventura. This adds 28 new classes to the MacCI Plugin. The new DCDeviceMBS class can help to generate a token that identifies a device for macOS or iOS.

The XML Plugin got a new parser class named XMLDOMParserMBS class. We added a ReSVGMBS class to use the ReSVG library to render SVG images to pictures. For the MemoryBlock class we added BitwiseAndMBS, BitwiseOrMBS and BitwiseXOrMBS methods.

Finally we updated CURL library to version 7.87.0, DynaPDF to 4.0.70.201, GraphicsMagick to 1.3.38, SQLAPI to 5.2.3, SQLite to 3.40.0, Xcode to 14.2, zint to 2.11.1 and zlib to version 1.2.13.

See release notes for a complete list of changes.

London Xojo Conference

Did you know we had already organised three Xojo conferences in London?

Yes, organised by Monkeybread Software for the European community, we had these conferences:

London 2012, London 2015 and London 2017

Now for the 4th conference in London, I am delighted that Xojo Inc. will take over and organise a conference.

Please join us in about 100 days in London for XDC 2023.
This conference is in English and we expect not just the European community, but quite a few people from all over this planet to join us.

As some people have trouble to get into the USA for past conferences, this is the chance for people from the following countries to come visa-free to the UK, but not visa-free to USA:

Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brazil, Costa Rica, Dominica, East Timor, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Israel, Kiribati, Macau, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uruguay, Vanuatu.

If you live in one of this countries, please come to London, so you can join the conference without getting a visa for the United Kingdom (or visa for USA for a conference there).

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 23.0pr8

New in this prerelease of the 23.0 plugins:
  • Fixed ExitCode for ShellMBS class on Linux.
  • Changed CoreAudioMBS methods to allocate bigger memory blocks to make sure NULL bytes can be included.
  • Lots of little documentation changes and updated Dash archive.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

MBS Xojo Plugins requiring Windows 8 or newer

In general we build our plugins to work on Windows 7 and up since we dropped Windows XP support long ago. But to use newer features on Windows 10 and 11, we have to require some basic functionality from Windows 8.

The following list of plugin parts shows for Windows 64-bit Intel, which use the newer functionality for Windows 8 to manage COM interfaces:

If you use one of them, your application also requires Windows 8 or newer to launch.

For the future, we may simply state Windows 8 is required for our plugins. And then some plugins may still run on Windows 7. Over time more Windows parts added will require Windows 10 or 11 to function.

Please let us know if you have questions.


Writing for xDev Magazine

The Xojo Developer Magazine publishes articles around Xojo for over 20 years now. It provides a platform for Xojo developers to share articles in a nice way.

The xDev Magazine couldn't exist without writers! They are always on the lookout for programmers with unique projects, interesting techniques, and innovative ideas.

If you're interesting in writing for xDev Magazine, please read the Writer's Guidelines for the details on submitting your proposal.

I am regularly impressed what nice article Marc creates out of my writings and a few pictures. And instead of hiding an article somewhere in the internet on a blog or forum page, they get nicely formatted, published and thus archived.

If you have something to share with the community, please contact Marc Zeedar and send in your proposals. Often we dig into a topic for a project and then later write a few interesting facts into an article to remember them later.

We keep an archive of our articles here.


article page article page article page

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 23.0pr6

New in this prerelease of the 23.0 plugins:
  • Added DebugMessages and CollectDebugMessages properties to CURLSMBS class as the new names for DebugData and CollectDebugData. Old names stay valid, but get deprecated.
  • Added Headers and CollectDebugMessages properties to CURLSMBS class as the new names for HeaderData and CollectHeaderData. Old names stay valid, but get deprecated.
  • Fixed an issue for CURLSMBS class, where the LastError was not updated by Perform called on CURLSMultiMBS class.
  • Deprecated SecureDongleXMBS class.
  • Added Available method to Rockey2MBS class.
  • Added ColorNumber properties to ZintVectorRectMBS and ZintVectorCircleMBS class.
  • Added HAlign constants to ZintVectorStringMBS class.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

MySQL 8.0.31

For everyone using MBS Plugins with MySQL can now get the library in version 8.0.31 on our website:

Libraries Download

Please use option on connection to point to the libmysqlclient.21.dylib for MacOS, libmysql.dll for Windows or libmysqlclient.so.21.2.31 for Linux.
You can just include the dylibs/DLLs in same folder as the application and point to them.
For macOS the libraries are signed and notarized, so you may be able to use them. If you include them with your application, you may need to code sign them again.

The whole package is a convenience thing, so you don't need to find those files on the mySQL download page.

xDev Magazine 21.1 Issue

The January/February (21.1) issue of xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:

Better in Person: London Meetup by Dana Brown
Dana recently visited London and met with some Xojo developers. It was a great preview of the next Xojo conference in April!

News from MBS Xojo Plugins by Stefanie Juchmes Unless you're following MonkeyBread Software's Xojo plugins closely, it can be tough keeping up with all the improvements. Here Stefanie takes us through the major changes to the plugins in 2022 -- and previews what is coming in 2023.

Xojo Eliza by Marc Zeedar
Meet Eliza, the original AI chatbot. In this retro project, Marc resurrects a 50-year- old program and gets it working in Xojo. Was it all smooth sailing? Not quite. Find out what it was like re-learning unstructured BASIC code.

Exploring Steganography, Part 4 by Eugene Dakin
In this expansion to his series, Eugene modifies his original Xojo project to now hide text in a picture, as requested by xDev readers.

Plus: Topics such as Xojo 2022R4, PDF Tables, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, and more!

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 23.0pr5

New in this prerelease of the 23.0 plugins: Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
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