Special

Introducing the “Welcome to Xojo” Bundle!

New to Xojo and looking for guidance? We've put together a terrific bundle to welcome you! Xojo Bundle

This bundle includes six back issues of the magazine -- all of year 21 in printed book and digital formats -- plus a one-year subscription (beginning with 22.1) so you'll be learning all about Xojo for the next year. It's the perfect way to get started programming with Xojo. And you save as much as $35 over the non-bundle price!

This offer is only available for a limited time as supplies are limited, so hurry today and order this special bundle before the offer goes away!

Article Preview


Buy Now

Issue 5.2

FEATURE

How Far We've Come

Updating a RB2.1 app to RB2006

Issue: 5.2 (January/February 2007)
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): 15,347
Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 5207
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

When I first started using REALbasic I was so excited to find a language environment I could actually use that I wrote a lot of different programs. A lot of different programs. I started dozens of projects that I never finished, some because I ran into programming walls I didn't know how to scale, others because I got distracted or just ran out of time or interest. Other programs I wrote worked great and I've continued to use those compiled apps and just haven't had a compelling need to update them for many years.

Recently, I found a need to go back to update some of my older projects and so I decided to edit them using the latest version of REALbasic. The process was educational. I was surprised to discover how much REALbasic has changed -- improved -- in the years since version 2. The IDE is completely different, of course, but there are dozens of improved language features, new classes, and other changes I'd absorbed so gradually I'd completely forgotten about them.

Today we're going to explore just a few of these changes. It'll be a nice look back at how far REALbasic has come from those early days when the IDE only ran on Mac OS (the Classic version) and barely compiled for Windows. Hopefully you'll also get a few tips on converting older projects to newer versions of REALbasic. Note that this list is certainly not comprehensive but it should give you some idea of the issues involved.

Converting to 2006

If you're new to REALbasic you probably don't have old projects of your own, but you might find code snippets on the Internet that are in older formats. It's a surprisingly common thing that people make stuff available but fail to keep the code or website updated (I'm guilty myself). If you're not familiar with some of the issues of upgrading this code to newer versions of RB, you might find the process frustrating, so hopefully this article will be educational for you.

File Conversion

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.