Carl Reynolds replied to me:
> Well if you can't abide the standard Windows controls then you do have a
> problem: you're using an operating system you don't like. I'm not very
> fond of Windows myself, but I'm not quite so ambitious as to attempt to
> supersede all of the underlying Windows controls with my own versions!
I have to point out here that my issues are with the standard Windows
control types, not with the actual OS itself. I'm quite happy with the
kernal, the GDI and most of the Windowing and event handling code, its just
the existing controls that are weak.
Strictly speaking we have only replaced the standard EDIT control and
created a replacement for Delphi's grid. Other candidates for replacement
are the page control and the tree view, and these are really low priority.
But once we replced the standard edit control with a component that
duplicated all of the functionality (caret, keyboard, drawing, selections,
cut'n'paste etc) we could then start to extend this is all sorts of fun
ways, and for little cost.
This also allowed Ian and I to engineer some more elegant handling of the
data-aware code so that the same control can switch from data-awawre to non
data-aware with a tiny cost, and the validation and formatting were more
under our control.
> I think you're aiming higher than the average developer, so I can only
> wish you luck...
I am certainly not the 'average' developer! And with Delphi to play with I
can aim extremely high and hit those targets.
> Our own components suffer from similar problems - among the things they
> expect is descriptive information of each database to be obtainable from
> tables within it, and they also rely on our own memory tables. So
> perhaps I should yield the point gracefully! :)
Indeed 8-). As soon as you start concidering elegant meta-data handling you
really need to start building additional stuff. This is one are that the
Delphi designers left some what bare.
And thats my primary contention, that as soon as you want to achieve real
RAD development, and leaverage all the meta-data, business knowledge and
special features in a database engine, the basic Delphi components are not
just not good enough and custom component development is almost a necessity.
Cheers, Max.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Zealand Delphi Users group - Delphi List - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz
