Ian Farquharson [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
>Max wrote a view-only grid from scratch (ie no VCL Grid code) and then
I
>inherited from that to make a grid into which you can drop any control.
Yes,
>any control can be dropped into a cell. (The control must inherit from
>TWinControl, although I could even have handled TControl with a bit
more
>time).
<snip>
>So whats my point? Just that Delphi could stand some improvement and
this
>improvement is achievable! If we could do it at Profax then Inprise can
>certainly do it. Maybe they should have hired us (hey thats not a silly
idea
>:-)
The grid sounds good. To you: are you considering marketing it?! To
those that have been complaining about the very basic nature of the core
VCL components: well folks, that's the whole core of Inprise's strategy
- to encourage others to enhance Delphi as well. You'll either benefit
from selling your own components over the web, or you're in the
comfortable position of having a lot of third party components to choose
from before you try to reinvent the wheel. Inprise have decided that
they're not going to spend forever enhancing their core components, and
why should they? It's a good plan, IMO.
>BTW: I did not read earlier messages in this thread :)
Too late, now you'll never know what you missed. :)
>Over the last three months I have talked to quite a few development
>companies around Auckland and I have seen two attitudes: if they are
still
>using Delphi then they will stick with it come hell or high water, if
they
>are not using Delphi then it is because Delphi does not a offer enough
of an
>advantage over the Microsoft tools to go "outside" the norm. Often they
have
>dabbled with Delphi but judged it only slightly better than VB. Hey,
can you
>blame them when all the VCL controls (edit, listbox, combo) are just
the
>standard Windows controls and the RAD database stuff (data-aware
controls)
>is a copy of VB/Access (bound controls)!
Hmmm. The problem is that it isn't immediately evident that Delphi
isn't as constrained as VB, and that (i) you can change anything you
want, (ii) (because of (i)), there are bleems of third party components
available, and (iii) Delphi should really be evaluated on the number of
decent available VCL add-ons as well as of itself.
I mentioned reinventing the wheel. What is more cost effective - to
spend two weeks developing a whizzy new generic component which you have
to maintain in-house, or to "waste" a day trawling the web, only to find
a component that does all you want and more, for a mere U.S. $100? We
made the mistake of doing the former before doing the latter only once,
and development and maintenance of our component cost a lot of pain and
effort. Now we look for other components first.
>I find it amusing that Access/VB programmers often don't use the bound
>controls for real work, just like Delphi programmers dump data-aware
when
>using SQL.
>PS: I no longer work at Profax, the cost of developing all those nifty
new
>controls and other VCL replacements was too high.
So you won't be marketing your grid then. Too bad. I find TopGrid's
generic grid a bit of a pain to use and could do with something simpler,
for the special cases where I don't want to use Infopower or Orpheus's
grids. But anyway, it'll do in the meantime. :)
>I am now doing C++ contracting :-)
But surely not C++ ObjectBuilder? After all, that _is_ Delphi!!
Cheers,
Carl Reynolds Ph: +64-9-4154790
CJN Technologies Ltd. Fax: +64-9-4154791
[EMAIL PROTECTED] DDI: +64-9-4154795
PO Box 302-278, North Harbour, Auckland, New Zealand
12 Piermark Drive, North Harbour Estate, Auckland, NZ
Visit our website at http://www.cjntech.co.nz/
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