---
title: WWDC2004 Session 636
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-636
---

# WWDC2004 Session 636

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en ladies and gentlemen and welcome to session 636 if you would please to turn off all cell phones and to remind you once again if you would please no recording or taking pictures during this session and with that said please welcome now Tyler stone [Applause] thank you good morning it's friday the last day of the conference I hope it's been going well for all of you we've had a very good conference I think this year as Apple has started returning to the enterprise we find ourselves encountering more and more customers developers out there with visual basic applications and they've been asking us for a migration path how can they port their visual basic projects over to Mac OS 10 so this session has been designed with that in mind I'd like to introduce Hank Marquis from slave fire software he's going to talk to you a little bit about how to port visual basic projects to Mac OS 10 thank you morning everybody I know everyone was up late last night was every bit up late last night yeah this is a resounding audience do your arms work do they move okay so you're still functional my name is Hank marquee is Tyler said I'm going to talk about moving applications to Mac os10 how many people in here have ever seen visual basic good how many people here have seen indoor use real basic good so this you're probably in that you're probably in the right place first I want to talk a little bit about what we're going to do the idea is that you're a developer and as Tyler said you have an application written in visual basic and for one reason or the other you want to move that over 20 s 10 or perhaps even Linux it's there's there's a number of different operating systems obviously OS tennis is the one that we're here to talk about today what I'm going to talk about is a process you can follow to move your applications over and actually have it work at the end you're sitting here and you say I have visual first of all what version how many people are using visual basic five or six not so not many how many people are using net feel like net I got to see a lot of this going on well if you're not familiar with how what Microsoft did there with visual basic five and six and all the way back I've been involved in visual basic since it was vb dots which was actually a professional development system and quick basic and things like that so back in 91 I got involved with with visual basic and every single version of visual basic up until dotnet could open the previous visual basic source code and just compile it executed and run no problem and dinette was the first time where you couldn't do that anymore so if you're sitting here with a visual basic application and you're thinking to yourself you need to move it forward and you think about net you have pain you're going to have to go through a conversion the language is different things don't exactly work the same and at the end of it it runs on Windows and what we're going to talk about here is the way if you're looking at that decision to be able to say well why would I do that when I can go through a much easier process with a language which is much more similar to visual basic and at the end of it I can have something that works under windows of course but as well more importantly other areas like OS 10 and others and so that's we're going to talk about how to make that happen I've been developing for a really long time my mother was a systems analyst for IBM she was in the mainframe programmer back in the 60s 1969 is the first time i saw a mainframe and i went with my mom to do key punch so i know a basic assembly language was in fact i started off as an assembly language programmer and by the time i was in like eighth grade I knew Fortran and stuff so I've been programming for a really long time and i'm going to use real-world examples and experiences so i'm not a marketing person who has got the latest words du jour i'm actually going to talk about the real world and real things that you're really going to you're really going to you're really going to hook up with so what i'm going to do is tell you how to port your application to OS 10 and i'm going to tell you how not to port it and if you actually follow this process you will be successful and then again if you're if you're someone who doesn't want to be successful for whatever you're vested interest is and you could just do the opposite of this and then it will never port and there's actually a pretty funny book out there that tells how to do stuff like that so at the end of the day I want to save you time pain in my so who am i as I said I've been around for a while I've written a couple of books they've published lots and lots and lots of articles and I was involved in the component vendor consortium I don't know if you know about that but it's a it's a third-party organization that analyzes components and give them sort of like an underwriters laboratory of approval I was the chairman of the Quality committee and did the the initial quality screening program if you will founded a number of software companies most recently the one I had founded was a with a company called new mega technologies was done acquired by compuware and written other projects and I'm currently now completely involved in the OS 10 world with the product real basic and we have a suite of productivity tools for real basic that are all about debugging so I almost know what I'm talking about when it comes to actually doing this and making it work so there's some assumptions one of them is that you have visual basic applications and we saw by the raise of hands that you did and the other is that you actually want to port them over to OS 10 and you said that you did hopefully you know something about visual basic and real basic 5.5 and for those that might not be fully aware of real basic real basic is a modern object-oriented language it runs under OS 10 or a variety of Mac OS really windows a variety of windows and you can compile for OS 10 windows and linux and I don't think I'm letting it out of the bag to say that the next version will run on Linux as well probably maybe I don't know the guy's a real basic will tell me the guys nodding so I guess I won't be shot at the end of this and you can all continue to live so so then you're going to have this complete complete capability to move back and forth it's very very similar to visual basic but there are some differences as well so I was going to tell you the top 10 things like everyone likes top 10 lists and then I decided to throw in an extra one so the things that we're going to so you get 11 c11 for the price of 10 you come for the price of none so what are the big things we're going to talk about well language keywords the things that you use every day to do things in the language how you put them together into syntax the data type how we structure data and work with it the structure of the language itself user interface obviously it's going to be a big thing and one of the biggest challenges to having a portable application it is the user interface the structure of the projects physically how are these things composed platform api's how many people in here is use Visual Basic that use windows API calls in it right okay so right away you got a little bit of a learning curve you've got to go figure if you have to say how am I going to deal with that Windows API call on another platform so am I going to just do a one-off build that only works here but if i want to go to OS 10 then i have to find an equivalent one or in some cases you'd be surprised how much you can do staying within the constraints we were able to build all of our slave fire products without using a single API call and they run on all three platforms so if you use some rethinking needs to be done but a lot of times you can do it in real basics pretty powerful usability things you want to do to make your application actually usable and Mac users have an expectation that Windows users don't so if you're moving a Windows visual basic application to OS 10 there's there's some things that you're going to have to deal with platform guidelines tools structure lots of cool things let's just jump right into it there are a whole lot of words that work exactly the same the learning curve from Visual Basic the real basic is I don't know if you're a vb developer in your good 20 minutes if you're new to well not a couple hours in all cases it's going to look really familiar right out of the box things like left right ask Easter these all work exactly the way you think they would and they should by the way this presentation actually has code in it positive feedback thank you thank you there are however just a few differences here and there that you will figure out one way or the other one of the ways is by paying attention to this and uses some of the tools real basic offers and the other way is to beat your head on it for a little while until you figure it out on your own that's what I did because I'm thick-headed but for example the keyword mid works just like you'd expect it to work except in visual basic mid can be used to drop it insert into a string at a point and in the in the in the real basic implementation currently today it does not now to real basics credit as they're moving forward with this visual basic migration story in fact I've been able to have input to the product and they're really great about soliciting input so things like that get get resolved so these little Sidious incra seas are slowly being removed from the language one of the big things that maybe be great and evil at the same time was the whole dynamic nature of it hey I can make a variable right now right if I don't have option explicit on I can just I can just make a variable whenever I want dynamic casting dynamic creation and that's actually not a good thing I'm sure someone in here would say no it's a great thing because I'm you know i can write good code and so on and so forth and I can handle that but at the end of the day it's not really good to have variables that aren't declared you know you're not going to last forever some you know someone somewhere someday is going to look at your code and go well what am i doing with this so real basic is much more modern in that regard with regard to object orientation and making you be explicit than visual basic is so we're going to see that how you can use that real basic is a very rich language graphically as you can imagine from its heritage as an OS 10 or a mac OS application visual basic you know graphic wise just you know this isn't there it's funny a funny thing a visual basic application by default can't even pick up the windows XP themes on its own so like your vbx look like Windows 3 dot 1 apps when you run them on XP though it's just that graphically it's not very cool but real basic is really graphically rich and there's lots of games and things like that that are probably right around here right now that are all written they have 2d and 3d rendering graphics engines built into the language so there's a lot of things you can do there what that means is that some of the words that are for example keywords in visual basic are not available anymore so like the string keyword well there's a string class in real basic and so on so you're using the string keyword and visual basic that's not just going to pour it right over you're going to have to do a different thing to make that work so there's some of those things you have to deal with so there's words there's keywords that are exactly the same there's keywords that are exactly the same only they do things slightly differently and then there's keywords that are completely different visual basic has space and int those two things don't exist in real basic so you say well gee how do I make a how do i make a padded string five characters long well for i equals 1 to 5 x equals x plus g HR 32 right next so that's how you do that so you might have to go make yourself a little module but someone's the good news is that's already been done for you for example the space key word is there's a module of visual basic things that are not in real basic you could just plug in and use on the other hand visual basic has some cool things that we always have to write and I mean if you've written in visual basic for any amount of time you've got dozens of classes of reusable stuff that you just drag and you keep using over and over again a lot of that can go away because uh because real basic has a lot of keywords at visual basic doesn't and then there's these sort of maddening little differences who knows who's right it doesn't matter who's right but real basic called it uppercase and visual basic calls it you case so you may say that's not so bad I can just go through my vb code to a global edit replace you case with uppercase and i'm happy like or i could import it into real basic and do a global UK's to uppercase so you can deal with it but something you have to deal with so at the end of the day you're sitting you're looking at a development path and you say can I do this I think the answer is yes similar keywords it's similar but you know rtm everyone know what that acronym stands for it no you don't know someone else read the manual right if you're going to pour I suggest you drop a dime in a couple of dimes and buy a book or two and I haven't published a book in real basic so I'm not pushing my own book but there are other books in the real basic documentation itself read it become one with it understand what the language does so that you know all I remember reading about that and you can move on so a lot of times because you're just like me i mean i get a piece of software i get the box i never even open it i downloaded i install it and I'm just like brute force I'm going to make this thing do what I want because that's how I am but in this case you know like my dad used to say when all else fails read the directions you know and then my dad would watch me do something I'd be beating my head my dad is a hardware guy my mother was a software go and so I do something all along my dad would watch me and then at the end it wouldn't work he go you know I probably wouldn't have done it that way so now that I'm getting you know towards middle age I you know I'm starting to realize she may be yeah I maybe I should have you know not when all those girls read the directions maybe I ought to read the directions up front especially if I have to do it so you can read as well as I can on the rest of them code syntax next big area these are the kind of things that will drive you batty but they're the things you need to know about in this case for example this is a real subtle kind of a bug by the way you can just drag and drop code from visual basic into real basic real basic can open modules and just load the code right up and show it in its editor and it actually looks pretty cool but here's an example of something that would it would terrorize you and and it's only because you were sloppy on the vb side now remember visual basic and i was one of those guys who the long time ago and visual basic first came out people are like well you can't do that only you know there's only good for prototyping you eyes and you can't write a real program and I was like yeah watch this i crack my knuckles and I do something that couldn't be done in vb you know like a file on a race program that did direct dis manipulation to be able to recover deleted files and people like we can only do that in assembler or c and like oh yeah check this out so so yeah there's you can be sloppy in visual basic or you cannot be sloppy but visual basic is forgiving that was one of the things about it so that means it's easy to be sloppy so let's say for example like this in this example here you've got visual basic code on top and you've got a definite a true Z and that means that for every variable declared in the rest of this code module if I don't explicitly declare it to be a data type the variable will default to integer because that's my default integer so anything that starts with a through z that's a variable that isn't explicitly cast default to an integer that's all well and dandy because on the second line of the first line of that form load up there I have dim x comma y as string now you might look at that because you know vb and go well sure x is an integer and why is a strength now load that code into real basic and go dim and by the way real basic doesn't allow you to do module level global declarations like everything that starts with a through z is a particular datatype so it looks at X comma Y as string and it says oh well they're both strings you want XYZ as string okay so I just kind of get you a little bit so all the sudden the code that works fine up on top you know a message box why you're going to get a type mismatch error you know because X is no longer integer X is a string now and you can't assign a numeric value to a string so the moral of the story here is that you should begin to become as explicit with your visual basic code as you can and by that I mean you're going to want to clean it up and that's kind of the the moral of how to do how to port start by cleaning up your vb code we all know what good programming practice is just not for me good yeah we all know what the right thing to do is and you need to go back and do those things to your visual basic programs now there are a few places where the syntax of the words are different we're into the syntax now in visual basic if you want to count down for i equals 1 to 10 a 10 to 1 step minus 1 it works backwards right it's intuitive except in real basic you don't do it like that you say for i equals 10 down to one there's no step minus one in real basic so you're gonna have to do a little bit of you know in fact you can actually you know you can actually we have that code in there the ten to one step minus one the loop just never gets executed it skipped right over it because I is already one or less than one when it starts so that's an example of something that needs to be fixed here's another example logic now in.net they did a very similar thing to what real basic did so the folks in visual basic for the longest time or and xor not these are both functions and + operators you know i can say a or b c equals a or b and it does the bit manipulations and in fact a whole lot of api code that you write for windows uses that kind of end not in or functionality to do bit manipulation Wow it doesn't work that way in real basic real basic actually has true bit manipulation so you're going to have to recode those things and use the bitwise class I mean it still has or and not for for logical partitions for example a or b if a or b then but you can't say you can't use a or b for example to set flags to pass to another call one example so the difference is don't make too much of a burden what was the main thing for you to understand the difference is that i talked about if you could just say it rtm are damn you guys are looking at me know what's going to say it all right Oh Artie I'm good thanks right very good yeah read the manual and begin to clean up your basic code get rid of all your death whatever's and turn on option explicit you've got a nightmare ahead of you come on not a nightmare but you have you know at least a couple hours of f5 splash okay f5 splash f5 is how you start a BB program in the IDE and it'll it'll like start to compile and go and then you'll have to oh yeah that's right X dim x as integer or dim why I string so you're going to want to go through and do that you want to get rid of your dynamic typecast this is the dollar the pound the ! the ampersand at the end of a variable name real basic doesn't allow you to indicate what a variable is by having a control character at the end of it so you can't have like X dollar in real basic you could have X as a string which is what it is in visual basic but you can't have the dollar at the end of it the dollar signs you want to remove all that look for loops look for those four loops I talked about just remember mark them that you're going to have to deal with them so that's not so bad let's talk about data types there's a whole bunch of data types in real basics that don't exist in visual basic visual basic actually has a pretty limited now you know you could think it's rich but I think real basic has a much richer set and it also has ND an awareness that visual basic doesn't have because remember if you starts going across different platforms all the sudden the order of bits and bytes stored on disk aren't the same anymore so you have to be able to say well is this thing read from left to right or is it read from right to left visual basic has the concept of a user-defined type and I've actually been interacting with real basic to to to talk about maybe getting that into the real basic language because there are no user-defined types per se in real basic what you do have in real basic is this concept of a memory block which is where you can allocate a chunk of memory and you can read any bit of it as any collection of anything that you want I can read the first four bits the first eight bits the first 16 the first 32 sort of at my leisure and I can do whatever I want so I can achieve the same result as I do with a static user-defined type with a dynamic memory block and I actually wrote a class that allowed me to because I kind of like being able to have the logic of of something that's you know having a type with a name like type dot name so i actually created a class that kind of gives that same functionality let you create user-defined types and add in excess their excess their members logically by name and so if you want you can email me or you can contact us somehow there's email addresses around i could i can email that to you realbasic is object oriented and it really is object oriented like seriously object oriented in its classified so not not like for security but you know like if it's a boolean then it's either true or false and those are the types of values that it can have so if i was in visual basic i could say and how many people have done this i could dim something as a boolean and then i can say if the bullying equals zero then beep well that'll work because everyone in visual basic knows that zero is false and minus one is true that's that's what visual basic things well unfortunately that's not actually technically right and in real basic faults does not equal zero and true does not equal negative one and true doesn't equal one either true is true true is a state and there's an actual keyword operator called true in one called faults so you want to go clean up your code you're going to say everywhere I have bullion's and I say if this equals one or this equals zero or a boolean is greater than or less than zero or something like that I want to go back and make it use true and false so by cleaning that up ahead of time you you're going to wind up a lot easier so here's an example of the real basic IDE with the variety of things you can do with the memory block which is a whole lot of different values so you can do a lot so conclusion one of the big things that kind of got me going a little bit was that in visual basic there's a concept of an integer and a long integer 16 bits long 32-bit well that's true maybe for the wind tell platform but it's not always true on other platforms so in the case of real basic an integer is the only kind of integer they have and it's 32 bits there's no currency type but again we can we can emulate one of those pretty easily and you can also create your own data types the bottom line is you've got to use memory box instead of UDTs it's easy there's a class it's already been done and so that's that's it so then as we move into say for example language structure now we've gone through the keywords and we've gone through the data types and those are kind of the constructs now let's see how we put them together to do something for example file i/o or air handling or object instantiation and things like that here's some code that shows how you would open a file and real basic and how you would open it in visual basic just a little bit different visual basic brought forth the quick basic concept that you open something in the context of file i/o you open a file you open a channel to the file or you open a port for example real basic is a little more object-oriented it has this sort of folder child relationship concept and that makes a lot of sense because not everybody has the same kind of organizational structure that you find under windows so so the real basic way is a cross-platform way and the Microsoft way is the Microsoft way so there's a little bit of work that needs to be done for your file i/o and things like that it's not that hard and I hope you're not getting depressed at all because I'm going to talk in a minute about a tool that's available from real basic that does most of this stuff for you called the BB project converter anyone here ever used that a couple people yeah it's a pretty cool little toy it'll do a good job tool it'll do a good job for you so as we start looking at the language structure here we can see for example how the structures of the methods and functions and events are put together real basic supports message functions and events just like visual basic does a little bit of difference here in there in real basic to exit something you would say exit function exit sub I'm sorry in visual basic you say exit function exit sub in real basic you just say exit or return it is the way to do that and the other interesting thing is that in visual basic if I have a function and it returns the integer I would say the name like the function would be called function 7 i would say function 7 equals the result of my function and that would be the return value in real basic you say return whatever the value you want to return is so you don't assign the value of the function to a function named you actually say return that value so that's a little a little bit of a difference but not that great but you can still do things like create properties with asset and a get method if you will and it works it works fine and I've had no problems you know taking classes from visual basic and moving them over with a little a little King the same thing with events most of the ways you raise event are going to be similar here's an example in visual basic and to do the same thing in real basic not not that not that different they both support by ref and byval but there is a little bit of difference in the declaration of events and it will take you a little time to sort that out but you know start small and you'll be able to do it so with regard to constructs there are no enumerations in real basic and I know a lot of folks people here use enums and your visual basic programs anybody only one or two ah and you don't worry about it but if you use them you like them and I've been lobbying real basic to put them in there and you know one of the lead development people from real basic is here so we can gang up on them and lobbying they all offer constants one of the nicest thing yeah the quartus is like new so one of the coolest things about real basic that I like is this whole cross-platform thing I can create a constant and then I can have that constant have a different value based on the platform that the program runs on visual basic has no concept of that at all and you find these kind of things in real basic all the time just when you think about something as a cross-platform tool and not a Windows specific tool some of these other really interesting things show up and have found their way into the language that orders are pretty awesome and they're really good so constants are going to work and you have even more capability with conference like for example you could do localization with your constants as well not only can you say what platform it is but what language it is and that's all sort of built into the language editor the UDTs are going to be you know something that will throw you for a loop initially but I already fixed that it's already solved email me and I'll be happy to send you a real basic class that let you do the equivalent of user-defined types no extra charge one of the differences in air handling that realbasic haves versus visual basic is visual basic has this really arcane thing that came at a G w basic which is like millions of years old for those who remember it which is the whole on error goto syntax and they still use that by the way well real basic doesn't use the on error goto thing you can declare an exception in an exception handler or you can use try catch and yet your choice which ones you want to use there are no line numbers supportive and real basic and i have used line numbers traditionally use line numbers for debugging purposes so you can sort of get an output of where you are and what's going on but there are no line numbers and the interesting thing is they both use raise to raise an error you can create and raise custom errors so your air handling subsystem is in fact most people let's face it most I'm just going to go out on the limb okay no one in this room but other developers you know who use Visual Basic don't use air handlers right yeah and one of the really nice things about real basic is that in the application open in the application object every real basic application has a top-level application object and there's an error handler in there that you can turn on so that if any of your other code does it have an error handler it'll chain back to that one so you can just write one error handler and have a graceful dump it sounds like an oxymoron right graceful dump that that's a lot better than it just splat so at least you know is so there's there's some really good things about the air handling and real basic that make it worthwhile one thing that's a little interesting to get used to is the whole dim new as new concept that real basic has versus visual basic the words are similar but not exactly the same it all has to do with object instantiation and in some cases you condemn something and then try to use it it'll it'll it'll splat because you didn't say new set equal the new thing so the the object instantiation is slightly different but once you understand it it becomes second nature it's and it's not that that difficult there's no set statement in real basic there's a new visual basic uses nothing and real basic uses nil and there's no let statement in real basic at all so I don't know most people don't use letting that's like old-school let a equal one you know I don't think too many people do that anymore so in conclusion you're going to do some work you're going to do some work if you move to.net I'm going to do some work if you move to real basic at the end of net you have this thing that runs on windows if you go to real basic you have this thing that runs on Windows OS 10 linux and it's my belief that that's probably a better way to go so at the end of the day the good news is it's not that hard I personally found it easier than trying to do net there's enough things to make it possible and your best bet is to get the manual read it play with real basic first get a feel for it learn every language as its own little idiosyncrasies it'll take you a little while to get away from the visual basic dropdowns with the procedure names in it to having a list of them on the side so just play with it get the hang of it and then you'll be able to move on user interface well you know suffice it to say anything that was designed and built around the Mac has a user interface that knocks the socks off of anything that came out of windows I you know I'm an IBM guy you know from my mom you know for millions of years but I just got to admit it you know it's um it's just it's heads and tails above it you know real basic has two-dimensional and three-dimensional rendering engines built into the language and it's just you can do some amazing things one of the other things I find amazing is again that cross-platform mentality made it so that if I write a program you don't even take Oh take take a vb program and make it so it runs under windows and i compile it on windows 2000 it's got that windows 2000 look you know that like three dot window three dot one look that well if i take that and go run it on windows XP it just picks up themes and it looks like it's a native XP app so as far as real basic is concerned there are different platforms and it does the appropriate thing and it does that for Mac as well does the same thing for linux i wrote a class that will take my application interface and size buttons and move things around based on where it runs so not only does it have the graphical look and color scheme and borders and so on but the actual button size and position themselves appropriately because when i get back to like mac users have the expectation that buttons have different titles and they're in different locations and and you know windows likes to do the whole abort retry you know hang yourself thing which you know you don't do in the macworld and things like that so anyway user interface is mostly the same except it's a lot richer vb has a thing called a picture box the equivalent thing in real basic is probably a pitcher well or canvas canvas has a lot more flexibility as the thing you can sub class and make your own thing control the picture well just hold the picture both support by the way your active x components will move to windows if you use real basic but activex doesn't exist in macs and therefore it won't work in that you don't have to deal with that real basic has this concept of plugins but the plugin is not an activex so there's there's these two sort of different methodologies but real basic supports activex but if you're going to move to apply owner doesn't support active x and calm and that whole windows infrastructure it doesn't work so the funny thing is is that when you get done porting your visual basic program into real basic not only will you have say OS 10 compatibility you'll have a program that handles windows better than visual basic does that's funny i just think that's funny ok so again you can read as well as i can if you're using things like tree view and list view it's going to be one of the biggest issues you have there is no tree view and list view equivalent in the the Macintosh world McIntosh has like I forget how many is like thirty six or eight different constructs that you can use for for user interface widgets or I forget the exact number so you're going to want to try to find a model because it's generally frowned upon to create your own controls you can create controls as long as they follow the model that you know Mac has this look and feel thing that you got it you got to kind of roll with so you're going to have to create your own and do that you may need that we call roll your own another good thing to do is to just stick with the intrinsic controls if you only use the controls that are there by default the ones that are built in that you don't have to ship an activex dll via comm object with then that's pretty much going to roll right over because those intrinsic controls are fine i already talked about the XP themes project structure when visual basic first came out it created a single big binary file and then they and then it used to get corrupted all the time and people would hang themselves and after enough developers you know if people would just it was terrible you had to start over and you had to have backups and it was just bad and then they brought in other formats and now would be be five and six the text savings except for FRx files are pretty much the standard real basic is the same way it's got a big binary file but you can also stay but it's XML if you want an XML is a nice format because it actually is nicer than working with text files so from a structural perspective you can use the XML or the binary file the app module is unique to real basic and it's pretty cool and once you get the hang of what it's about the whole object will basically ended truly and once you begin to get the feel of that you're going to have you know to be able to you're gonna be able to do some things you couldn't do in visual basic that are good menu creation and structure is a little bit different than visual basic and real basic they both have editors but they're just a little bit different and then there's the MIDI SDI MDI issues not so much an issue anymore because Microsoft is pulling back from the MDI concept if you know the latest versions of Word and Excel and PowerPoint from someone for example aren't MDI allocations anymore they show up down as individual copies of the application so you can make em di applications if you want in real basic but there's there's really no need to AP is we talked about this a little bit as we as we got going but one of the interesting things about real basic is that kind of like who remembers vb for ya go to old old school guys out there yeah we're still here um well they had this and even in vb five you had this this the strange ability to be able to say if it's 16-bit code do this and if it's 32 bit code do that well it's the same kind of concept here but it's like if I'm OS you know nine or carbon or whatever do this if I'm OS 10 do this if I'm Linux do this if I'm windows do that and so you have these declarations and what you can do then is you can use Windows API sore ever a p.i you want you just have to do a block of them for whatever the particular application is that you want so it's um it's actually a lot more flexible okay some of the other considerations you're going to have to deal with we you know don't forget the fact that there's a different expectation for Macintosh users versus Windows users they get the look and feel there's the way things work the way things look the way things are named there's a there's a process flow that you want to pick up so you're probably going to want to go download the platform development guidelines and things like that tools how many people use tools for that you know in their vb world space like optimizers or debuggers or things like that nobody don't need them only a few people gonna have to find them program structure issues we talked about it so well at the end of the day I think that if you're a you know a three-quarters decent visual basic developer that made you been writing in visual basic for a year or two or maybe maybe a little bit more you should have absolutely no problem porting almost anything you've done in visual basic to real basic it's going to take some manual tweaking and you have to decide up front because we've I've spoken to some people that have said well you know what i wanted to me that this thing's been dragging along since vb3 and i've wanted to like redo this for a really long time and i'm just going to start from scratch and real basic but i don't have to throw all my code away because i got some classes or some modules and some things i've done that i want to reuse so you have to decide once you look at it whether you want to you want to toss it in come from scratch but in most cases at least some of the code will move forward if not everything almost all of your user interface will just come right over just show right up and look fine and like I said window specific custom controls will be the the biggest problem you have you know dealing with dealing with that so and also you're going to need some tools well you don't need it but wouldn't it be nice if there was something you could get for free that would translate your visual basic program into real basic for you and give you a starting point go like this oh you guys did stay up way too late last night we should have that music you know thing they call it the cone you know like the orchestra music in the background visual basic project converter what is it where does it come from it's a free tool from real software it's got a drag-and-drop interface on it and it will attempt to convert your visual basic stuff to real basic stuff and it works like this you drag your real basic stuff over you drop it you click button out squirts real basic stuff as converted as can be done given the constraints that we just spoke about if nothing else in some cases things just load and work and there's a trick using the project converter that'll make it easier for you and in some cases it loads up and real basic and it won't work for 15 or 20 minutes while you oh I got it oh that's right that should be as integer all you know and you got it you got to do a little tweaking but it brings it right over it's not perfect but you know what it's a lot better than not having it so I am we're going to talk about exactly how it works so before you use visual basic project converter you need to clean up your BB code and this is where like how many people I don't know how many times I've done this but it's like it's you know especially newer vb developers got sloppy you know using variants and using ampersand instead of plus and not casting things and just generally being sloppy and writing code that C programmers always laugh at us for well it's you know it's easy to be sloppy as we said if you didn't do that you're way ahead of the people who did because now you're going to have to go back and unlock your code and for example you want to get rid of ampersand for concatenation of strings that's wrong in the first place it's really slow its it use you know use plus you want to get rid of all those you know dollar signs and the other things we talked about you want to dimension all your variables hopefully on a single line for your own your own sanity dim x as string then y as integer that would be really good get rid of all your def x def in depth long whatever you've been used and get rid of it and just remember that whatever you have cast as an integer in visual basic will become an integer in real basic but an integer in real basic is four bytes long not two bytes long like an integer and visual basic try to get out of using currency and bite if you can otherwise you're going to have to work around them when you get it over you can use the char ASCII combination as a bite replacement usually you can do some manipulations to be able to do that substitute double for currency okay before anyone starts slinging I know there are rounding differences between doubles and currency that's why currencies like it is the real basic developers know that in fact about two or three months ago we had a another session like this in a real world which is the real basic trade show and you know with great detail several real basic developers very nicely articulated the issue I you know they're going like this it was funny and so I know it's being worked on the error handling that you have in your vb code is just going to go away it's all going to become commented by the project converter so you're gonna have to find it and fix it after that so things to do beforehand get rid of go to I mean you can use it but you know if you don't need to don't I mean you can still use it but you can't say go to a line number you can go to a label move things from forms into modules bust up your code if you can into into chunks of related function if you haven't if you've got the all-singing all-dancing vb4 map you know you must have seen them if you've been around long enough it's like you know form one and it's 6 megabytes big takes forever to load and it's just everything to try to break it up there's no such a thing as ghosts of and real basic so functions and methods and logic are going to be required and real basic does have the database engine and has sequel capabilities it's different than the sort of Microsoft model you know the a do control model that visual basic has but the sequel logic will largely be compatible you know select star from whoever things like that will work fine so what was the experience using it well it always creates a project now real real basic doesn't have individual modules as we already said I mean they do logically but when you save it on disk it's one big file whether it's XML or it's a binary project so if I just bring over one module of a visual basic code that I want to pour it'll port it and it'll create a real basic project with an application object it will have a default window in it and it will have my module so you're going to have to take that and then save that module out on the side that's not that hard to do some things are going to be problems like I when I was doing some conversions I had I had a variable in one of my programs called graphics actually with the class I think so I had it whatever I was using the word graphics well graphics is a reserved keyword in real basic because they actually have a paint event where you get a graphics handle would you have to use API is for and in visual basic actually just happens by default there's an argument pass through the pain of benefit of an object or a forms like ah here's the graphics object and that's a graphics dot this or graphics about that so that keyword is you know they've got to worry about worry about those things so my advice use the vb project converter to convert one file at a time after you've converted a file export it or make what real basic calls make external which is how you can have external files and how you share files between projects make it external and then debug report that code this gets back to busting my code up into modules and things I can exercise and you know just do it again and again until you're done it's called programming in the end you can do it it works I'm living proof of that and just remember that real basic is is object oriented it's in my opinion a better language than visual basic and why do I say better because it made me get cleaner about the code eyes would write and I'm just I'm just I'm programmed now you know I'm like I'm going my lightsaber shines green instead of red you know I'm over the dark side so um uh you know I find myself dimming everything and everything's a class and I'm just you know I just this whole object oriented thing is taking me over it's cool I like it at my age you don't learn new things very often so again you can read as well as I can i talked about most of these things import one piece at a time test as you import build them up as external pieces and now you've really moved your visual basic code into a stage where you can compile for any platform you want not the least of which is OS 10 and of course that's where this gentleman comes in come back up for a second thank you very much Hank thought it might be nice to talk about a couple marketing opportunities after you've done the work Hank outline for you and you have a publicly available app whether it's commercially available or freeware shareware application you might want to get the word out about that having taken the time to come to a new platform so here's a couple free marketing opportunities that are available for you the first is the real basic showcase so the folks at real software have put together our part of their website real basic calm / showcase and you can go there and list your application and one waits for customers to find out about it the other is the Macintosh products guide so it's a shot of it there there are 25,000 products in the Macintosh products guide you can list your product for free and there are also pay opportunities to get some of these larger ads that you see there and that's it guide apple com and that is very much the storehouse of record for all the products available for Mac OS 10 and I would encourage you again if you have a publicly available application to list them in these two different areas take advantage of these freako marketing opportunities for more information you're welcome to contact myself Tyler stone developer relations you can see here Hank's email address up there which is Hank at sleigh fire calm and you can also contact the folks at real software mat qua Liana has volunteered his address matta real software com you want more information about the real basic tool itself we're doing pretty good on time here let's run through these a resource library reference library I'm sorry so we have some resources available for developer tools / it's Lee fire com there's actually a good comparison of different IDEs out there at the coated food with the rosetta site and and go to the real software side if you want to see it kind of a point-by-point comparison real basic to visual basic from a feature point of view