twinBASIC Weekly Update

twinBASIC Update: April 1, 2025

Highlights include 2D and 3D graphics engines converted for tB use, initial touchscreen support in the tB IDE form designer, and PacMan in tB!

Mike Wolfe

Apr 1, 2025 • 7 min read

On April 23, 2021, I helped Wayne Phillips introduce the world to twinBASIC at the Access DevCon Vienna conference. I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025. With that goal in mind, this weekly update is my attempt to keep the project fresh in the minds of the VBA development community.

Every ~~Sunday~~ ~~Monday~~ week, I will be providing updates on the status of the project, linking to new articles discussing twinBASIC, and generally trying to increase engagement with the project. If you come across items that should be included here, please leave a comment below.

Here are some links to get involved with the project:

Highlights

TouchScreen Support Added to the Form Designer

The twinBASIC IDE received touchscreen capabilities this week through commissioned work. BETA 727 introduced support for moving and resizing controls along with pinch-to-zoom functionality in the form designer, while BETA 730 added the ability to place new controls via touchscreen.

Wayne Phillips explained the practical benefits: "I don't think many will develop on a tablet... but many laptops have touchscreens these days. I use it in combination with the keyboard input - not instead of, and I find the touchscreen can be faster for some tasks."

This feature serves both developers with touch-enabled devices and those creating applications for touch interfaces. As fafalone noted, "even if you don't want to do full development on them, it makes sense to develop for them, and in that case, some work has to be done while on them."

^{*Feature summary generated via Claude-3.7-Sonnet}

Discord Chat Summary

^{* Auto-generated via Claude-3.7-Sonnet}

Overview

This week's discussions centered around ActiveX control compatibility, debugging challenges, and several UI improvements to the twinBASIC IDE. The community explored solutions for control compatibility tracking, out-of-process debugging needs, and touchscreen support in the form designer. There was also notable progress in VB6 compatibility with successful project imports running without modification.

ActiveX Control Compatibility

Wayne Phillips proposed creating a dedicated GitHub issue to track compatibility for well-known ActiveX controls, suggesting a community-led approach with indicators for 32-bit support, 64-bit support, and designer support.
Community members noted challenges in creating shareable reproductions when testing controls, especially with client-specific configurations that cannot be publicly shared.
Out-of-process debugging was identified as a critical need for ActiveX control development, with Wayne estimating it would take about one week of work to implement a functional version before v1 release.

Debugging & Development Workflow

BClothier highlighted two pain points with ActiveX controls: lack of vbWatchdog support (requiring fallback to line numbers and Erl) and absence of out-of-process debugging capabilities.
The community discussed workarounds for debugging DLL files within projects, noting that VBG files/project groups aren't yet supported but are planned for post-1.0 release.
Packages were suggested as an alternative to VBG files, with the ability to create private packages to approximate similar functionality.

IDE Enhancements

Touchscreen support was added to the form designer in a recent update, supporting moving/resizing controls and pinch-zoom functionality, though control placement is not yet implemented.
The feature sparked discussion about development priorities, with Wayne clarifying that commissioned work like touchscreen support helps sustain the project long-term while staying aligned with overall goals.
Visual Styles can be toggled in projects by adding or removing the Visual Styles manifest from the Resources folder, providing flexibility for UI appearance.

Bug Fixes & Compatibility

A bug with MSComctLib.ListView column widths was identified and reported, though columns can be resized at runtime as a workaround.
An issue with Friend Property declarations in implemented interfaces was fixed in BETA 730, resolving a "Duplicate definition" error that prevented EXE compilation.
The community discovered that PropVariantClear should be used instead of VariantClear for certain variant types to prevent crashes, particularly in 32-bit environments.

Conclusion

This week demonstrated steady progress toward the v1 release with important bug fixes and feature enhancements. The discussions around ActiveX control compatibility highlight the community's focus on ensuring broad support for existing VB6 codebases. The successful import and immediate execution of a VB6 PacMan game without modifications serves as an encouraging testament to twinBASIC's compatibility goals, while commissioned features like touchscreen support continue to modernize the development experience.

Around the Web

2D Graphics Lib Binding for SIGIL

Over in show-and-tell, JazzCoder1 posted the following:

What is SIGIL:
Sound, Input, and Graphics Integration Library
A very simple cross-platform library for playing audio, handling basic input, and drawing 2D graphics such as sprites, shapes, and text. Designed to have little or no learning curve.

The project is available on GitHub:

3D Graphics Engine Ninfa3D

JazzCoder1 also posted the following:

Here is a binding/wrapper for the 3D graphics engine Ninfa3D.
Ninfa3D uses Irrlicht as the graphics engine, Newton for physics, and OpenAL for sound.

...

I want [to] be clear here. I did not create Ninfa3D engine. I just made an API binding to it for twinBASIC. I am using the 32-bit pre-compiled dll.
While the source code for Ninfa3D is available, I do not have the C/C++ skill set to convert it to 64-bit.

The project is available on GitHub:

Enhanced PacMan in twinBASIC

In the general channel, fafalone posted the following:

Enhanced PacMan worked first try, zero changes, import save run 😁

Changelog

Here are the updates from the past week. You can also find this information by visiting the GitHub twinBASIC Releases page.

AI-Generated Changelog Summary

^{* Auto-generated via Claude-3.7-Sonnet, sorted in order of its opinion of "most impactful changes."}

Fixed critical ActiveX control issues - Resolved issues with ComCtl controls like CodeJock CommandBars and CalendarCaptionBar that were previously causing crashes, plus improved handling of control licenses and embedding.
Improved form designer experience - Fixed mini-toolbar positioning when using zoom feature and added touchscreen support for adding new controls to forms.
Enhanced diagnostic capabilities - Added new trace options for COM class creation monitoring, helping developers debug component interactions.
Fixed file I/O reliability - Binary file operations now properly raise errors when attempting to write to read-only files, preventing silent failures.
Resolved lifecycle event issues - Fixed Form_Terminate event firing and Class_BeforeFirstMethodAccess behavior, addressing important application lifecycle management bugs.
Improved Screen object compatibility - Fixed Screen.TwipsPerPixelX/Y returning zero in DLLs, ensuring proper display metrics in all contexts.

WARNING: The following issues are present in BETA builds 623 - 730 (the latest build as of publication):

IMPORTANT: This is an interim/experimental release. It includes significant changes, so some instability is to be expected. [Editor's Note: Rolling back to BETA 622 may be necessary if any of the KNOWN ISSUES below affect your project.]
KNOWN ISSUE: Controls are not being destroyed properly by the form designer, causing big memory leaks (broken in this build)
there are known memory leaks in these versions, so memory usage will be higher than at the Version 1.0 release

BETA 723

fixed: some edge cases in the ActiveXExtender that were preventing some AX controls from working (e.g. CodeJock CommandBars) [ kimpos, private ]
added: support for AX controls ToolTipText property (not UCs yet) [ kimpos, private ]
fixed: specific crash when adding CodeJock CalendarCaptionBar to a form [ https://github.com/twinbasic/twinbasic/issues/2070 ]

BETA 724

fixed: Write/Put statements internal error handling [ https://github.com/twinbasic/twinbasic/issues/2076 ]

BETA 725

fixed: many AX controls do not correctly set TYPEFLAG_FLICENSED in their typelibraries, leading tB to not embed their licence keys

BETA 726

added: trace option 'Trace IClassFactory::CreateInstance and IClassFactory2::CreateInstanceLic calls for exposed COM classes' [ kimpos, discord ]
added: trace option 'Trace DllGetClassObject calls (entry point for COM/AX creation of your exposed classes)' [ kimpos, discord ]

BETA 727

fixed: form designer mini-toolbar position was incorrect when zoom feature was being used

BETA 728

fixed: Screen.TwipsPerPixelX/Y would return zero in a DLL in some instances [ kimpos, discord ]
fixed: class event Class_BeforeFirstMethodAccess could cause FPU args to the target method to be zeroed on Win64 [ sokinkeso, discord ]

BETA 729

fixed: some further issues with embedding of AX control licences [ kimpos, discord ]

BETA 730

fixed: form designer adding of new controls now supported via touchscreen [ commissioned work ]
fixed: Form_Terminate not firing due to some circular references [ sokinkeso, discord ]
fixed: an AddIn Host class WithEvents bug that could lead to a runtime crash in Addins
fixed: spurious 'duplicate definition in the current scope' messasge from the compiler in some cases [ VanGoghGaming, discord ]