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Exploring Xojo's New DesktopGrid Control

Issue: 24.5 (September/October 2026)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 20,422
Starting Page Number: 45
Article Number: 24506
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project24506.zip Updated: 2026-08-31 13:09:01

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Excerpt of article text...

For years, a criticism of Xojo was that its listBox control was too limited. It's great for displaying simple tabular text but struggles with more complex data. Also, since it doesn't load on demand, for large amounts of information (i.e., thousands of rows), it could become slow. While over time, the listBox has been improved, adding support for text editing, checkboxes, and pictures within cells, each cell is limited to just those types of controls.

With the new DesktopGrid control, however, you have almost unlimited power. Each cell is, in effect, a containerControl, meaning it can have multiple controls with its own layout (think of it like a miniature window). See Figure 1 for an example.

So, should you stop using the listBox and switch everything to DesktopGrid?

Two Similar Controls, Two Very Different Approaches

The main difference between DesktopGrid and listBox is that the former pulls its data as needed from a datasource. This makes it much faster for larger datasets and lets you create more complicated data layouts, but it's also a lot more complicated to implement.

You can write code to fill a listBox in Xojo in just minutes; a DesktopGrid will take you much longer to set everything up. If you're doing something simple, like just displaying some text, a listBox is probably the way to go.

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