Attributes and constant values So there is an interesting problem that crops up when you try to use a constant for an attribute value. I use the term "problem" here in a loose sense, it's actually just a behavior to be aware of since it's a bit of an edge case. The "problem" boils down to what the context is for resolving a constant in an attribute list. Given the following code: Attributes( SomeName = kTest ) Class Class1 Const kTest = "Hello world" End Class One might think that this code is perfectly legal, but one would be wrong
September 2008 Archives
Some of the old-timers in the REALbasic community may remember a global API named DebugDumpObjects. The purpose of this heinous method was to dump a file out to disk that would enumerate what objects are being used in the application, as well as a bit of information about how much memory is currently being used. It was a useful API for its time, but it was still terrible. For starters, it would dump the file out to disk next to the application. Permission issues aside (of which there were plenty), this makes it much more difficult for you to run
When the release notes contain hundreds of notes, it's pretty easy to miss out on some interesting items. I tend to enumerate the big ticket stuff in a "what's new in XXX release", but I'd like to try pointing out some of the little fixes which slip into a release. Think of it as a condensed version of the release notes. It's also fun to expound on some of the bugs a little bit to make them more personal and less...well.. "marketing related." :-P SaveAsMactintoshPICT and SaveAsMactintoshRasterPICT are deprecated now. Can you guess why? No, it's not because I'm on
I'm happy to announce that we released REALbasic 2008r4 today! This release has some really awesome additions, as well as a ton of stability fixes. As usual, I intend to list all of my favorites. ;-) I think my number one, most favorite thing of all time (for this release, anyways) has to be the ability to use constants as part of other declarations. This is one of those things that is actually a pretty major feature, but most people probably see it as a minor bug fix. It means that you can finally use constants as part of method
It's been a busy time lately for me, but that's not always a bad thing. In addition to getting ready for 2008r4, my brother-in-law got me hooked on World of Warcraft again. Mmmmm, the sweet joys of gaming addictions. So I've been finding most of my free time in the evenings has been filled up with BG and grinding. But my level 70 hunter has never looked so good! ;-) It's been about a year since I last played WoW, so I had a bit of catching up to do. If you're rollin Horde on Dunemaul, let me know. Sorry
It's pretty rare that I do straight-up trackbacks into other people's blogs, but the latest post by Eric Lippert really deserves it. He discusses the four different classes of exceptions very eloquently. While he's talking about .NET, the same truths apply to REALbasic as well. Definitely worth a read! http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx
(Note, all of the information presented here is just what I've happened to glean from other sources, so YMMV.) When looking into the recent spate of stack-related questions about REALbasic, I realized that my understanding of how Windows deals with stack space was rather weak. Of course, at the high level, all call stacks are basically handled in the same fashion. The stack starts at an address, grows downward, and when you run out of it, bad things happen. The part I was confused by was: why were we getting stack exceptions from the OS that our own REALbasic stack
Travis asked via the Suggestion Box how we use REALbasic to meet our daily needs at REAL Software, which is a question I see plenty of other people asking as well. What are the upsides and downsides to bootstrapping the product, as well as just generally "whaddya use it for?" It should come as no surprise that we use REALbasic to create REALbasic. Specifically, we use REALbasic to bootstrap the IDE, and for developing parts of the framework. This means that we're using the currently released IDE to build the next version of the IDE. This has some great benefits
This topic seems to surface about twice a year, and I figured it might be a good idea to do some educational work to shed a bit of light on the topic of stacks. There are several different "stack problems" that can plague an application, and understanding what problems can arise will help you code better. The way work gets done in applications is by the CPU allocating space somewhere for your data to live, and then executing instructions that work on that data. The convention for this process is to use "stacks", so that you can have data local
Via the Suggestion Box, Jef asks how I manage to do my work from SoCal when the company resides in Austin, TX. Why, I telecommute, of course! ;-) I started working from home a few years back when I needed to get out of Texas and move back to MN. So I've been doing this for a few years now, and honestly, I wonder how sensible it would be for me to go back to an office setting. My productivity was pretty high when I was working in an office ("indefatigable" was the word I believe one of our
