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.