[quote=29298:@Gary MacDougall]We’ve based our whole product on Windows based development on Xojo and have since 2007. We’re a small company, but our product is very expensive, albeit niche in nature, but its 100% Xojo and its served us well.
The one thing that we did run into with Xojo was some push back from an IT professional (Veep) when they were tasked with looking at our technology as a possible “merger” or acquisition. The IT person, being mostly .NET (of course), found that our decision to go with Xojo was, and to use his words “perplexing when you could have used .NET”.
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I read your post in another conversation. I have developed with .NET from its beginning having received the early betas however I have developed with other languages too, BASIC, MASM, C/C++, even something called Clipper in the dBase days before Windows was relevant. There is absolutely nothing wrong with development in other languages, the whole world is doing it and the whole world is not just Microsoft or Apple. The ‘IT Person’ who evaluated your software was just narrow minded and his employers should have recognised that but they probably had even less experience than him. A programming language is just that ‘a language’ and I don’t think that I am alone in being able to switch between them and translate ideas from one language to another. If Xojo is doing it for you then stick with it, if you have another reason, say an architectural reason, for changing then do so but don’t do it for language snobbery. Your customers obviously do not see the language, they see the product. Xojo gives you an easy development environment for three platforms if you need them.
I think you need to be a bit more confident about Xojo, if I were faced by the ‘IT Person’ I would make his arguments look very silly because they were no doubt ill founded, there is nothing perplexing about not going with .NET when you have a successful product - what difference would .NET have made? Probably this, probably that - in the end - nothing, in fact the learning curve alone could have killed your business. Be proud of what you have done (I am sure that you are already) and if you meet any similar ‘IT People’ then tell them that they lack experience - or send them over to me so I can do it for you. I have .NET, C/C++, Ruby and others right in front of me and when I use Xojo it is because it is the right tool for the job in hand.
PS. If there are any Xojo Inc. people reading, we know that you will make it even better with iOS, 64bit, .NET etc. and in the meantime open it up a little with command line compilation, a stable published source code format and IDE plug-ins so that others can supplement your efforts. I would love to be able to work in the Xojo IDE and manage a database, use SCM, generate a UML diagram, run a code generator, do smart refactorings, manage and use code snippets. And how cool if I could write one of those plug-ins in Xojo itself so that it would work on any platform.
