Funcoder Technology Blog

Its fun times at PC Soft again with another stack of amazing new features for WinDev, WebDev and WinDev Mobile.

We will have to wait for the English release date for the products, but I am hoping that they will be much quicker than 12.

I will be working through the French Découvrez les 501 NOUVEAUTÉS and let you know the new features that are in this version.

If you have never herd of or tried WinDev then you are missing out on an incredible development environment.

I used to do all my development in Visual Studio.NET and was getting very frustrated with the buggy IDE and the amount of code you have to do in .NET just to perform the simplest of tasks.

With WinDev I have been able to build professional looking websites 70% quicker.

I just love coding in WinDev and WebDev, it’s brought back the fun in coding.

I just didn’t get the Seinfeld adverts, they were just to out there. But the new Microsoft adverts I like a lot.

Now I’m a PC and a Mac. I love both platforms (yes even Vista). It was fun to watch the Mac adverts take advantage but finally Microsoft have fired back. What I like about these ads are that they focus on people using a PC in real life, nothing about attempting to slander a Mac.

Here’s a tip if you develop using WebDev. I recently had a timeout issue that was occurring on our live web server but not on my development box.

WebDev 12 supports remote debugging, so open your project and then make a remote debug connection. You can then debug the code and see which line is causing the issue on the server.

Is that cool or what?

Social Networks like Twitter are great fun when you are in the mood to create some little apps.

Here’s a simple example code to get some of my friends tweets. All I did was look through the Twitter API and picked out a simple REST method to get some XML back as a test.

Reading XML in WinDev is very simple using a few methods. I recommend you run the URL in a browser and return back some XML data you can then use to play with. That way you are not making lots of calls to the Twitter API (which is limited by design anyway).

sLine is string

iPos is int

sUrl is string = "http://www.twitter.com/statuses/friends/funcoder.xml"

ListDeleteAll(LIST_Results)

IF HTTPRequest(sUrl) THEN

    sResult is string = HTTPGetResult()

    XMLDocument("XMLDoc",sResult)

    XMLFind("XMLDoc","user",XMLChildItem)

    WHILE XMLFound("XMLDoc")

        IF XMLFind("XMLDoc","created_at", XMLElement) THEN

            sLine = XMLData("XMLDoc")

            IF XMLFind("XMLDoc","text",XMLElement) THEN

                sLine += " | " + XMLData("XMLDoc")

                IF sLine <> "" THEN

                    ListAdd(LIST_Results,sLine)

                END

            END

        END

        XMLFind("XMLDoc","user",XMLContinue)

    END

    XMLCancelSearch("XMLDoc")

    XMLClose("XMLDoc")

END

You can then move on to some further experiments and combine different social networks to create some unique mashups.

Thanks to PC Soft we made great use of our WinDev beach bag.

If you live in an earthquake zone then Mark Miller is the man to learn from when it comes to survival.

I love The Logo Creator software. I can create logo ideas really quickly based around the cool templates.

Just to let you folks know that if you open www.funcoder.com on your iPhone then you will get a nice clear iPhone interface to read the posts.

Thanks goes to http://iwphone.contentrobot.com/

Fortunately I have never needed a divorce lawyer but if I did then this would be the one for me.

I mean just look at the business card. Ingenious

This is an amazing adventure seeing Matt meeting people from around the world and everyone sharing in a fun dance.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.