Info

What is XBasic?
For those who have no or the wrong clue what XBasic is all about;

XBasic is a 32/64 bit programming environment designed to create applications in Windows and Linux. It is a freeware comprehensive programming environment for people with an average knowledge about programming.
XBasic has in some areas similarities with QuickBasic and in some methods it looks a bit like Visual Basic but the are by far not the same thing (anymore).
 XBasic shares a range of default programming features that can be found in Quickbasic and Visual Basic, however XBasic's scientific library offers a wider range of functions and is by far a couple of hundred times faster than QB and VB. Another extra is that XBasic does not have memory limitations like you have in QB and VB (even today).


Who created XBasic
The one responsible for the prior releases is Max Reason.
Max is a veteran if it comes up to programming... (One of the first pioneers programming in Microcode and mnemonics). The goal was to create a language that was simple enough to learn but powerful enough to use on a professional base.
 
In this matter he really archived success but the current development status of XBasic is not perfect at this moment. In order to get bugfixing done, Max needed more users, but at that time he was commercially selling XBasic through Basmark and this part was a less success. So in order to get more users, Max decided to set XBasic freeware. This worked, more internet users passed and downloaded XBasic, but also more complaints got in. Most users got into "starting" problems and accustoming problems (that's why you are hopefully here). And also a lot of users discovered hardly resolvable bugs. Another problem was the out of date Linux version of XBasic.
To put the pressure away of users asking the same questions over and over again, one of the users opened a mail-archive account at Egroups (currently known as Yahoo groups) to have other users communicate such kind of problems with eachother.
Still this did not lured users with expansion ideas for XB, or users that missed "default" programming features most other languages usually had and also the loadsome of users that had "discovered" a "new" bug didn't wanted to move of Max's back either (not to mention about the Linux users).
The third step was acquiring a new person to update the Linux version.For this platform, Eddie Penninkhof became the headmaster of XBasic development. Not long after he also got in charge of maintaining the Win32 versions of XBasic next to Max.

The last step became logical and the suggestion done by the user-community was to make XBasic Open Source. And so today XBasic is Open Source under GPL terms and it's libraries are freeware under LGPL terms.

LGPL in this case Means:you are allowed to sell your programs written in XBasic with the libraries. You are not allowed to charge money for the runtime libraries (XB.DLL) but you are not obliged to publish the source-file of your core-application just because you distribute the runtime libraries with it. This would have been otherwise if Max released the runtime under GPL terms as well.

The time has past that bugfixing XBasic and lecturing users raised above Max's head and his time to keep maintaining XBasic was ending to clog up in the funnel it was blubbing through. So Max passed the torch to Eddie Penninkhof who today is head of the herd in debugging and updating XBasic, being assisted by a couple of helpful XBasic users.


So what about this site?
This site is being maintained by an XBasic user who started using XBasic in 1999.
However this site also contains material from other people who wanted to publish valid information.
I put this information here in order to offer a solid starting and return to point if you would.
Most information is gathered through the output from the XBasic mailinglist archive at Yahoo since that is the center of questions dumped.
What you find here is most likely 90% of the FAQ that have been posted there.
You can probably get 95% of the available information around XBasic (not only FAQ) from here (if it is not locally stored here, you will meet plenty of links around).

The main reason why, is to offer a wide set of resources to help out people getting accustomed to XBasic during their first encounter with the programming environment.
Another important reason is to dimmish the frequency of certain FAQs being posted to the XBasic mailinglist.

I personally had a lot of problems getting accustomed to XBasic because of the tempting ways XBasic had a lot of QuickBasic features (as it seemed) but nothing is more true, most functionality concepts Max took from QuickBasic to keep XBasic compatible when he started to develop XBasic are now only reduced to just a bunch of keywords that still share QB kind of keywords.
So I felled into dozens of traps and I have mailed a couple of MB in questions and suggestions/solutions to Max to get things done.

What I personally share here on this site are the traps I felt into when starting in XBasic because I feel that someone else does not need to take the same unnecessary steps I did to get things done.
You eventually end up in the Yahoo-groups archive asking questions that have passed the archive many times.

So I have ordered the navigation-menu deliberately in a way that "Online Support" is the last option you can click on because if the upper resources on this site won't give you an answer, you can always try other resources that this site links too.
I can give tips and hints here but I would just suggest you to browse around and see if you can find anything that answers your question.
Chances are likely you will. (If they are not locally here, you have a good starting-page to start looking from considering XBasic documentation and support)



Sincere regards,

Vincent Voois