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 22 in printed book and digital formats -- plus a one-year subscription (beginning with 23.1) 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 23.4

COLUMN

The Case for Unit Testing

Debugging an Extension Conflict

Issue: 23.4 (July/August 2025)
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): 13,301
Starting Page Number: 51
Article Number: 23405
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project23405.zip Updated: 2025-06-30 14:16:03

Related Web Link(s):

http://omegabundle.net

Excerpt of article text...

Recently, I was updating my Xojo Beginner's Collection (see Figure 1) book for the new Omegabundle (http://omegabundle.net) when I ran into a problem. Tracking down the bug took way more time than it should have taken because I wasn't using unit testing. It's a good lesson.

But first, let me back up and explain the situation, the problem, and how I found the bug.

The book is a collection of all "Beginner's Corner" columns published by xDev—over 125 of them. The book is massive at over 1,200 pages. It's obviously published as an ebook, and a printed book would cost a fortune!

To generate the PDF, I use my xPub tool (which I mentioned in xDev 16.4—see https://www.xdevmag.com/browse/16.4/16402/ for more and demoed briefly at the Xojo Conference in Berlin in 2017). This is a program I wrote in Xojo which allows me to use a Xojoscript to craft ebooks. The script can generate a cover or other images, create different sizes of ebooks or different versions, and much more. It's powerful but can be complicated. It's still limited at the moment and needs more development, but it's already useful.

In theory, to update Xojo Beginner's Collection, I simply needed to add the last two years of new columns to the source folder and regenerate a new PDF.

In practice, this doesn't always work so easily. Two years is a long time in computing, and often there are changes to the operating system or environment that cause some issues. For example, Apple might make some changes to the way fonts are handled, and that can mean my generated PDF doesn't draw correctly.

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