First time posting - part 1

Sorry for the long 3-part post, but I’ve been trying to boil my thoughts down into a few topics on C# vs. Xojo.

First off, I’ve been a lurker on this forum for a while. I consider it as a “yeah, but…” kind of resource in the Xojo world, but also an important resource in trying to get an overall picture. After reading posts for a couple years, I have to say it’s filled with some real characters, and it’s interesting to read the various takes on Xojo. I think in the end though, the forum is a group of mostly professionals who used Xojo and were advocates of it, but have moved on for various reasons. But below all that, they still harbor hope that maybe Xojo will one day make a turnaround and become the product that they used and believed in. Myself, I’m a “root for the underdog” kind of guy, and I WANT to like Xojo, as I gather many of you would.

Since I’ve never posted before, in the interest of TLDR, I’m a 70 year “old guy”, retired sys admin. For over 30 years though I also built custom reports in RPG III from legacy databases (like, IBM Sys/36 era stuff) and custom VBA-driven Excel workbooks and VBA applications in the Linux emulator used by the companies I worked at, and I now have my own little one-man gig where I take care of a handful of companies with reporting needs and custom spreadsheets.

I’ve been firmly planted in the Windows world since 3.1, and all my customers are also in the Windows environment (as most retail businesses are, I’d wager). I also bought a MacBook Pro last year just to play around with it, but I haven’t tried any development work on it yet.

Over the years I dabbled in Java, Python, VB, and C#. The problem was that I just never really had enough time when I was working full-time. I still keep plenty busy with my existing customer base, but I also still want to tackle stand-alone apps. I did try to get more into it after I retired, but a bout with cancer put a real damper on that. Fortunately, it was completely removed through surgery (so far so good after over 2 years now, but those damn radiation treatments really do a number on you, and to this day I still feel its effects to some degree.)

Back to programming though, I did spend some time with Xojo. When I first downloaded it a few years ago, I got really excited about it, because as I tried fooling around by adding some code I thought, “Well hell, this is just like VBA!” But instead of continuing with the free version, I impulsively went all in by buying a Pro license and subscribing to the Xojo magazine, along with several tutorials from the Gumroad store. I watched the older tutorial videos on YouTube and most of the more up-to-date ones.

But the more I played around with it, the less impressed I was. The deal breakers for me fell into a few categories in part 2 of this post.

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Continuing with my earlier post:

The IDE. It feels clunky and aged. At first I tried to mark this down to just not yet having spent enough time to get familiar with and start liking it, but as I built a few simple little apps I just couldn’t take to it. And debugging feels clumsy. But the Visual Studio IDE feels light years ahead of it. As far as being cross-platform, well, so is C# with .NET Maui if I ever decided to branch out to Mac or mobile. And if you’re not doing desktop forms development, you can even install C# and .NET on a Mac with VS Code and have access to a huge number of plugins.

Console apps. You have to spend a grand just to be able to build console apps? Enough said.

Xojo itself. Frankly, I don’t know how they do it. To have such an ambitious tool that’s built, maintained, improved, marketed and supported by, what? A company of less than 20 people? That’s mind-boggling to me. Hell, even Microsoft has its hands full with regular updates when it comes to .NET Maui, because it means maintaining compatibility with Android’s and Apple’s multiple OS versions.

The support. This falls into a couple of categories. Mainly, and by far, are the learning resources. I can’t stress how important this is to me. Most of their core foundation Xojo tutorials are around a half-decade old, back when Dana was still with Xojo, and for as hard as she tried to get the concepts across, they just didn’t hit home with those ridiculous graphics and stock images that took up half the screen. There was something of a resurgence in tutorials in the last couple years, but other than a few of them, they can’t really be called introductory or tutorial videos.

I did download the free PDF beginner’s book, but again, very scratch-the-surface stuff, with imposing, distracting and irrelevant graphics. I guess the videos and textbook are designed to appeal to the absolute beginner, but to me it just doesn’t feel…serious. More like whimsical, maybe.

What I wanted was something to really take me from points A to Z. But other than the videos described above and the resources on the Xojo site, that’s pretty much it. Only a few independent (and aged) YouTube channels that cover Xojo, no books other than a couple that are decades old, and not really any online resources other than the Xojo forum, which is pretty small. There WAS what sounded like a really comprehensive book that was slated for publishing a couple years ago, but even that died on the vine.

But C#, wow. On YouTube alone, take your pick. Foundational 1 hour to 9 hour videos and videos that cover any single concept in-depth. Udemy? Tons of tutorials covering beginner to advanced. Books? Dozens on C# from multiple publishers available on Amazon alone with extensive coverage for tutorials and reference. C# 13 and .NET 9 that just came out? There are full-coverage books already available on it. C# Data Structures and Algorithms? C# OOP? Agile principles in C#? C# Concurrency? C# game development?? There are comprehensive books for every one of those topics, all geared toward C#.

As far as the other side of support, I mean the Xojo forum. It does seem to be an experienced and dedicated group for the most part, I have to give it that. When I read comments by posters like Rick, Tim, Jeff, Christian, Beatrix, Julia and others, I think, Damn, these are some smart people!

But the community is a small and possibly shrinking group (based on some people I’ve seen posting over the last couple years that seem to be dropping off the radar). If I want to understand how something works or how it’s implemented in Xojo or get help with a problem, there’s basically one small resource. Speaking for myself only, if I have a question on something or want to understand it better, I want to be able to “trample” all territories. With C#, again, I can go to what feels like limitless resources.

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Continuing with my earlier post:

As for me, I’m now about halfway through an online C# course I bought, an ambitious course that takes you from the basics to design patterns, multi-threading, SOLID principles, application architecture with separation of concern, optimization, and more. I’m smiling and sometimes chuckling as I practice the tutorials and think, “Damn, this feature is really cool!”, and “Wow, the IDE can do that?”

I guess it all comes down to not only the points I made above, but the fact that I can build stand-alone compiled programs in C# for free, have access to an incredible array of tools for little to no bucks, and have access to a mind-boggling number of support and learning options. With Xojo, if you’re not going to be selling your work to justify it, it’s a fairly hefty price for the Pro license and have a comparatively tiny field for learning and support. Now Geoff himself might rightly say, “Well, we can’t compete with free”, and I agree with that 100%. And I have no hesitation paying for a dev tool that’s worth it to me. But if I’m going to do that, I would hope for a dev tool and support and resources that also makes me go “Wow!”

Now if Geoff were to read this post, his response might be, “You, sir, are a moron.” To which I would raise my glass of beer and reply, “I, sir, will drink to that.” I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a pro. I’m still what you would call a citizen programmer. I wrote VBA code for the companies I worked at, and now I’m writing it for my customers, and they like my work and are happy to pay for it. But with C#, I can start with it and I don’t have to worry about limitations if I want to take it further down the rabbit hole. With Xojo, I’m not so sure. (I suppose the argument could be made that, “Dude, you’re 70. How much longer you think you’ll be around?” I don’t know. But now that I’m doing what I always wanted to do after all these years, I just know I’m having fun with it now.)

Do I hope for Xojo’s demise? Absolutely not. On the contrary, even considering what I can interpret of Xojo’s trajectory, I still hope they can survive and become even more successful. I still check the forum, subscribe to their YouTube channel and X (aka Twitter), and I would certainly consider trying them again if I thought it would be viable for me.

But it seems like it would take a considerable investment to increase the size of their development team to yank much of the wiring and rebuild the IDE, extend the language and framework, build a team to focus on bugs and quality control, and decide who their target audience really is.

But maybe I’m wrong and maybe there’s a method to their strategy. If the pricing structure, support, release cycle, IDE, language and framework can gradually be improved in time, I’d say good for them, and I would again consider it myself.

…or maybe they should just make it open source and charge for support. :slight_smile:

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FYI I congealed all your posts into this one just to make it easier for people to read from start to finish

And welcome !

Well there ARE a lot of Xojo users here so you can ask anything and you’re likely going to get an answer
You might get several with “Here’s how I’d do this in C# , java, Swift, 8th or lord knows”

10 or so
in fact only 5 developers

There is one that despite its age is still relevant in any ways
RealBasic : The definitive guide from Matt Neuberg
While specific screen shots etc arent useful the techniques are
And he still teaches decent concepts

Personally I’m well aware of that one
And the title was good but that seemed to be about as far as it went :frowning:

Can you share the source?

It is not that we want that, it is just that most people can see the broken bridge ahead, but the driver silence pasengers and just accelerates.

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Sure, I found her channel on YT several months ago when I was looking for a C# OOP tutorial, it’s https://www.codebeautyacademy.com/courses/practical-programming-course

If you scroll down to the course syllabus, it’s an ambitious course, but I’m finding that she’s covering everything she talks about so far.

And sorry, didn’t mean to imply that anybody wants to see Xojo’s demise, I was just speaking for myself. I think people on this site gripe about its shortcomings and limitations exactly because they want them addressed, and hope against hope that somehow it will happen. I have to hand it to Xojo for such an ambitious goal, but its execution needs work imho.

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Welcome to the forum, and great post. Love the self-aware and self-deprecating humour (which I share).

Tip: instead of 3 threads, why not simply make 3 posts in 1 thread? Then people just have to scroll and not hop to another thread.

Maybe @npalardy could merge them into here?

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Thanks, it’s a great forum for getting a more complete picture of the good, the bad, and the ugly when used along with TOF. I did think about putting it all in one big honkin’ post, but I thought people might balk at a War and Peace intro page. Any future posts won’t be nearly as long, but I’ll remember to keep it all in one post.

Welcome to the forum and enjoy your new caoabilities and freedom. And yes, there is a lot of more capabilities than Xojo ever had. Gut luck and have fun.

Done

Naw no one will gripe about it and even if you created a new topic then made the first 3 posts it would work just as well

Helps to keep the thread contiguous rather than 3 separate ones

Just a bit of terminology:

  • A post is any comment, answer, or question that you ‘post’ to the forum
  • a thread is for a topic and collects all posts about that topic
  • If you have a different subject in mind then that topic should be posted in its own thread - thread hijacking is frowned upon as it makes it more difficult to find answer when they are posted under an unrelated topic
  • Admins can move related posts into their own thread

Thanks!

Got it, thanks!