Funcoder Technology Blog

The Android platform is becoming a very popular choice for consumers here in the UK and its a good time for developers to start building applications for both our clients and consumers.

Just look at the popularity of the iPhone app store and Android is growing to become just as amazing.

PC Soft have seen the potential of this market and added some enhancements to WinDev Mobile to make it Android development a breeze using your current WinDev skills.

So what will the WinDev Mobile for Android platform support?

Claudia kindly sent me a list of some features that will be available to us:

“The controls will automatically have an "Android Look".

The local database of Android is SQL Lite. You will be able to link controls with the data through the 7-tab window, and use the WLanguage functions of the "H" family.

The creation of applications for Android will be based on WINDEV’s Java generation, however you will still develop as usual in WLanguage.

The layout of the screen (vertical or horizontal) will be handled using the anchoring method.

WinDev Mobile for Android will offer these controls:
- Label
- Radio button
- Button
- Looper
- Image
- Tab
- Edit control
- Check box
- List
- Combo box
- Menu.

257 WLanguage functions will be available for Android.”

This is very exciting and I can’t wait to get my hands on version 15 and start developing for the Android app store.

WinDev procedure parameters are passed by reference as a default and this is great but can also cause some strange issues in your code if you are not careful.

There are a few ways to pass an object by value and one of my favourite is using the LOCAL statement when defining your parameters.

Here’s an example:

If you don’t define anything as LOCAL then you can also tell WLanguage that you are passing by value just by adding brackets around the object you are passing:

CalculateWinnerPrizeTotals((nWinnerID), xCost)

So the example above shows how you can tell the method you are passing nWinnerID by value and not by reference.

I’m a few days late on this so I would suspect most of you know about the latest updates which fix a number of bugs in version 12 and 14.

http://www.windev.com/ts/download/windev14/index.html

The WinDev 14 update fixes a number of bugs with the Windows Editor, Report Editor, Setup and Execution.

There was no WebDev 14 update but they did release one for version 12 which fixed bugs with the Data Model Editor, Query Editor, Page Editor, Reports and Printouts, some install site changes, programming functions, PDF formatting in Linux and a fix to the HyperFileSQL HClose method in a thread.

It’s a strange name but a great step in the direction for the community. If you have any handy API’s, libraries etc you can post them to the site so that others can make use of your fine work.

You need to create an account and then you can post a resource (blog post) to the site.

We are really starting to see some momentum now at PC Soft so I am very excited about the new site and community spirit.

http://repository.windev.com/

The current releases of WinDev has a bug when you want to use the TX Text ActiveX control on a WinDev form.

There is a work around by adding the following code to the initialisation method of the ActiveX component.

A fix for this will be in the next release but at leased you can easily work around the problem.

Thanks PC Soft Support for this…

UPDATE!!

This afternoon I received a telephone call from Claudia at PC Soft. She discussed my comments in this blog post and explained about some of the benefits we have received from a later version which included more examples translated to English.

I reiterated about the number of bugs we are getting with this new version and Claudia has asked for you to please send bug reports to PC Soft so that they can investigate them.

She also wants to hear from you if you are having any issues with PC Soft or concerns about bugs not being resolved. Please contact Claudia at claudia.rivera@pcsoft.fr and help her to understand any issues you have.

I discussed about the bugs that developers are complaining about in the latest version

I have been developing applications and websites in WinDev / WebDev for the past 2 years. So why this question now?

Well we have seen the release of Version 14 at the beginning of this month, 6 months after the French release. Come on now PC Soft, 6 months is a lifetime in the technology industry. If they were really committed to expanding then you would see the English version created in parallel to the French.

If you look at other development tools, many produce multi-lingual versions and release them at the same time.

Maybe its a problem with their codebase which makes it complicated to created multi-lingual versions, but surely they would be working towards resolving this.

The other issue is the lack of communication between the community and PC Soft. The www.windev.com website it pretty much stagnant with no focus on providing information about news, tips etc.

What about LST? Why do they not produce an English version?

Don’t get me wrong, I love programming in WinDev but I feel it is a very lonely experience. I am also finding it harder to convince clients their are other developers that can support the systems I write. I know there are some but we are talking so much less than there should be.

WinDev 14 has made me re-think about this product, not only for the 6 months wait but then the quality. Every day I come across a bug which is driving me nuts.

The new version has all these new information messages to help you build quality code, but it generates these errors even on PC Soft’s own RAD classes.

I don’t want to move back to .NET but its looking more that I will have to. It’s sad as I have already started writing a WinDev book but what should I do?

I think now it the time for the powers at PC Soft to speak up and be more open about their future plans.

We’ll there’s my rant and you are welcome to disagree. Leave a comment and maybe we can make PC Soft aware of our feelings and hope they will become more involved in the community.

I am very happy to announce that I have started work on a new book focused at the new wave of software development using WinDev. The book isn’t just about understanding how to program in Wlanguage, it’s a complete guide to my approach when developing software.

Here’s some of the topics I will cover:

• Powerful communication tips to help you have successful meetings with clients and get the information you need.
• Keeping focused on your own. If you are a solo developer then you are going to love this chapter on how to keep the motivation going.
• Developing robust OOP code in WinDev.
• Test Driven Development Really Works!
• Keeping the client happy.
• Always give the client more…

From concept to completion, you will learn how to produce quality solutions, elegant tested code and some exciting ways I keep relaxed and focused.

Once I have a good amount of content I will be releasing it as a beta book in PDF version. If you would like to be notified on the progress of the book then please follow me on Twitter.

I would be very happy to hear from you about any topics you would be interested in the book covering. Just drop me an email at funcoder@gmail.com with the subject line Funcoder Book.

With May now approaching the hopeful release of WinDEV, WebDEV and WinDev Mobile 14 is on its way.

Here’s my Top 10 new feratures I am so looking forward to in this release:

1. Container Columns in Table

You can now add controls into cells to make some incredible table views. Tables are my favorite control in WinDEV 12, especially when I look back to my .NET days and the amount of code I had to write. Happy days!

2. Google Apps Integration

We have some great plans for using the Google maps integration in WinDEV. I know this was possible before by hacking some code together, but once again PC Soft have made it a breeze to implement.

3.  Widescreen Environment

I use a 20” screen for my development and always have WinDEV maximized to cover the whole screen. Now the IDE has more improvements to allow for better use of the space.

4.  Class Data Binding

You can now drag a class into a window to create corresponding controls and bind them together.

5. Monitoring Tool

You can monitor the availability of your systems, including http servers, WinDEV and WebDev applications. Email messages can be configured to alert you when problems occur.

6. New RTF Formatting Buttons

The RTF features in version 12 were OK but I really wanted more functionality.  They have moved forward a little bit adding justification but I still feel we have a way to go on this one.

7. Controlling Devices Around the Home

WinDEV 14 now has support for domotics CM15. I know this is a bit of a geeky feature for me to be excited about. But being able to control devices around my home from my WinDEV apps is very cool.

8. RSS Feed Parsing Engine

There are a number of new commands I can use to load an RSS feed and parse it. You can do this with the XML parser but now I can do it with just a few methods.

9. HTTP Functions for Processing Forms

In certain applications I have needed automatically fill out web forms, which is not an easy task. Not until now that is, as there are new simple HTTP methods to build the form and send it.

10. No Declaring Arrays as Zero Length

This was just an annoying feature in Wlanguage but now you don’t need to specify zero when declaring an array.

PROCEDURE MyProcedure(ArrStrings is array of strings)

As you probably noticed from the posts on my blog I am creating more websites lately for clients.

I wanted to make this post to make a point about one issue I have with the HTML code that WebDEV creates.

As a test I created a simple page in WebDEV and Dreamweaver 8. Here’s the page I built:

Now the old style way to build a page is using TABLE elements, but that’s just not done now. It causes all sorts of complications with compatibility with browsers, even though WebDEV has some compatibility functionality.

As you can see in the above source code generated, WebDEV builds the layout around tables which is really horrid.

I would love to see WebDEV take a leaf out of the Dreamweaver book. I created the same design in Dreamweaver 8:

As you can see the code that Dreamweaver produces is so much cleaner and will also load faster as it is using CSS to layout the page. This is the code I want to see WebDEV produce, clean, quick and modern.

What do you think? What are your views on this?

Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Here’s another example for some Internet Marketing work I did a few days ago. It’s a landing page for an Affiliate to promote a Guitar course.

Building the layout was very easy as I just use drag and drop with some additional bits of code for the flash streaming of audio testimonials.

One of the other things that WebDEV is that the IDE lends itself to help me optimise the page for SEO.

You can tell I’m having fun with this… On to the next Project…