Check out Visual Forms from Jeremy North

Finally I had the time and chance to check out the new Visual Forms Expert Jeremy North has written. Since he does not have (yet) a demo available, I thought you might want to read an independent opinion on this tool. Well, most know that I am not much into visual application development, yet there is one large VCL application, I am currently supporting at BMW. And this one just seems perfect for checking out Visual Forms.

So, I have installed this new tool into Delphi. The installer makes that really easy and already shows something else brewing on Jeremy's computer. Take a closer look at the version selection box ;-)


Within the BDS you can now access the Visual Forms using CTRL+SHIFT+F12, note the relation to the normal form selector window. For projects, where you have not Visual Forms before, you will see an empty list. You have to refresh the list once before using it. The expert will open all forms and make snapshots of them and caching them for its view. This cache is persisted between your BDS sessions. All settings can be adjusted from within the IDE.

Once you have set up Visual Forms for your project, which takes just one click and less than a minute, even for projects with 30 forms, like mine, you can select your forms visually.


Pretty soon you will dock the Visual Forms window into your BDS default working layout and make sure, that you'll always have easy visual access to those forms. I have put it in the right lower corner bundled with the Tool Palette and this is where it will be from now on.


So Jeremy, please add support for project groups. Currently when working with project groups, only the forms of the selected project are listed. How about all at once ;-)

Thank you for this great addition to our beloved IDE!

Developer NOW! - Meet DavidI

DavidI is traveling once again. He will come to Mülheim (close to Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Wuppertal) and talk about DevCo and the future of our favorite tools InterBase, Borland Developer Studio and others.

Also, you will meet Jason Vokes, Ingo Düppe, Daniel Magin and Bernd Ua. Be sure to check it out and possibly come.

More information: Developer NOW! Homepage

Delphi SpeedUp, now for BDS as well

In my last post I presented you the Delphi SpeedUp expert for Delphi 5-7. It worked on BDS 2005/2006 as well, but now has been heavily optimized for those environments as well.

Further, Andreas has made available the full source code. Give it a try (at your risk), but users do love it.

Delphi SpeedUp, D5 - D10 (BDS 2006)
Delphi SpeedUp Source Code
Original Post (in German)

Have fun and let me now how you like it ;)

Give your Delphi a performance boost

Andreas, a member (nick jbg) of the Delphi-PRAXiS has introduced a plug-in for Delphi 5, 6 and 7, which will boost the overall performance of your IDE.

The Expert will replace some of the vital functions with functions from the FastCode library, as well as replacing TList methods with those from FastObj. The whole expert will do that during run-time, so once you remove it from the IDE all will be back to normal. Give it a try, currently he offers version 1.4.

Delphi SpeedUp 1.4
Delphi SpeedUp Installer Source

Attention: use at own risk! ;-)

Community Welcome Page - Spanish uploaded

My deepest apologies, once more to Albert, I forgot to include his spanish translation in the first upload. Finally, after fighting CodeCentral once again, it is online and available for download at the same address, too.

So, forgive me please, for dropping your work in the first upload. Therefore, your fixes and suggestions are included as well.

For all of my readers, stay tuned for a summary of first comments, suggestions and ideas. It will be online here, soon. Just waiting a little more. Some nice suggestions are pouring in, already.

Community Welcome Page - finally arived!

Just wanted to let you know, that the upload finally worked out and you can download the Community Welcome Page from CC/BDN now.

CC Entry

Community Welcome Page - finally ariving...?

So, it has taken much longer than I hoped for. Sadly this didn't add to the features, it has just taken some time for things to get set up, like a new BabelCode server, translations, final tests, supporting Borland Delphi 2005, and so on.

I have created a CodeCentral entry for the Welcome Page, got pretty much all finished, just the upload does not work, for some reason. So I have put in a request to do a download to CodeCentral from one of our servers. I'll try to contact John Kaster tonight and hope to get this finished.

Further, I am preparing an article for the BDN giving some more insights on the workings of this Community Welcome Page.

Keep checking out the BDS Community Welcome Page entry in CC, it will be up shortly now.

Have fun,
Daniel