I have had a fun day playing with Xojo. I still love the new IDE. However I have been able to try it out on three operating systems and generally I feel that it is much better on OS-X/Linux than on Windows (only tried on Windows 8). I have a massive spec Windows machine, i7 @ 3.5GHz, 32GB RAM, Samsung Pro SSD so there is no reason why the OS should be slow and indeed it is not slow. I see the flicker but that has been done to death elsewhere on the forum. What I also experience is some application crashes and very slow compile times in Windows compared with my humble MBP13. Linux in a VM on the same Windows PC is very fast too and I only got one application error when using Ubuntu 64 bit and none in Ubuntu 32 bit.
So my feeling is that there is more to be done on the Windows version, with the obvious flickering and some app crashes just by clicking on a few project items I get the impression that maybe the Windows version was not evaluated enough from a developers perspective. Writing an IDE using your own compiler is probably the best example of ‘dogfooding’ but maybe trying to use your own IDE as a developer (on Windows) is the second best.
Oh and Serial Port - what is happening with serial port enumeration on Windows, it is so slow that it causes the window to show as ‘Unresponsive’. There is a lot of work to be done with threading and asynch callbacks, you cant have UI’s that lock up. Strangely (or not) it is so fast on OS-X and not bad on Linux.
Please file Feedback cases for all the crashes that you see, if you haven’t already, thanks.
Thanks William - but that wasn’t really my point 
FWIW I use the Windows IDE a lot, on Windows 7 64-bi t with 12GB of RAM and haven’t see these crashes you’re seeing. Compiling seems on par with my OS X machine, maybe slightly slower, but not glacially. As for the serial port, yeah we haven’t touched that in years, there are certainly better ways than what we’re doing to iterate through them. I could use a few testers though, when the time comes.
I am happy to test when the time comes if you would like me to. Plus any comments that I am making are done from a positive helpful perspective - I do like what you have done with Xojo.
The crashes I see, seem to be more related to GUI elements and adding, moving them around, or deleting them. Not that RS was much better, but I was really hoping that was a thing of the past.
Carl, do you have any Bluetooth modules with serial profiles paired with your windows system? The enumeration process as it is currently implemented on the Windows version suffers massively due to the lag of Bluetooth. You can improve that by removing any Bluetooth COM ports that you don’t need.
William, please add me to the list of testers when the time comes, which is hopefully very soon. My serial port terminal app has a good sized user base that would be happy to get their hands on a beta version that improves on this Bluetooth issue.
Hi Roger, I do have a USB Bluetooth dongle, I use it to connect my Apple trackpad and mouse. It does show use any SPP/COM ports in the BT settings tab (which itself takes a long time to show a list of no items) but you are right about the effect of BT, as soon as I unplugged the dongle the COM port enumeration is fast on Windows. Thank you for that, it is not a great solution but at least I know what is causing it now.
You should be able to just remove the COM port created by the dongle without having to unplug it. I had the same issue when I connected my Apple trackpad to a win7 PC. I don’t remember exactly how I did, but I think it was via the device manager. I’m still using my trackpad on the PC, but serial port enumeration is quick.
By the way, the feedback ID for this serial port issue is #8212 if some one else wants to sign on (please do!). It’s been there for almost exactly 4 years, and it’s currently amongst the top 10 ranked issues, seemingly without getting any attention from RS/Xojo.
<https://xojo.com/issue/8212>