I don’t know how many people know this but activating D3NT is a real breeze in v7.5.x because activations are provided transparently over the internet. Hmmm, this seems to dove-tail with the Web Services blogs.

Back in March 2008 I wrote a blog here called Lonely Shell Variables. Today I was fiddling with shell variables in D3 (also called Environment variables) and once again I marvelled at the power and flexibility – but I’d bet the number of people who really use this functionality can be counted on a single [...]

I needed to get information out of D3 and there is no standard function to get it. After a couple emails with TigerLogic support, I was able to write two lines of code to get what I needed. Wow, that’s cool. Now should I be a good community citizen and give it away? Should I [...]

A question came up in CDP about what a “large” dynamic array is, when used as a select list, and when lists should be processed as dimensioned arrays versus dynamic arrays. The answer can be more complex than one might think.

A while back I wrote a blog entry on how D3 FlashBASIC works. That blog/article was recently re-published in International Spectrum magazine. Yay! In the QM forum a question came up as to how D3 caches BASIC object code. I thought the little I knew about the topic would serve as a supplemental update to that [...]

I got an email about an issue with high-precision data passed to NebulaXLite. That started several exchanges with Tiger Logic Technical Support, and I’m summarizing what I’ve learned here.

Questions frequently arise in forums about how FlashBASIC works. So I thought I’d summarize it here. First, a primer on compilation and object code in general

A question came up in comp.databases.pick that asked how we could use a pre-defined set of values in a D3 query. For example: SORT CUSTOMERS WITH STATE "AZ" "CA" "NM" "OR" … but getting the state codes dynamically. Sure, we can do that, using shell variables.

A recent forum posting said the D3 Reference Manual is "confused" about which %functions are for Unix and which are for Windows. I have a lot of comments on this topic but with just a couple minor exceptions I disagree with the statement that the doc is really "confused" anymore.

Even after years many Pick people aren’t quite sure how atb7 or 8 work, they just put something one place, then the other, and if it works they leave it until they find out it doesn’t work for some new purpose. Here is how they work.