Developing Custom Delphi Components by Ray Konopka

• Summary
  This book is targeted at Delphi developers who wish to create their own components for Delphi (Isn't that one of the main reasons to love Delphi?). It covers all the concepts of Component development, and walks the developer through the component building process. Starting with very simple enhancements to existing Delphi components, it quickly moves to examples of creating brand new components, not based on a standard Delphi controls. Non-Visual components and Data-Aware components are discussed in excellent detail. It concludes with chapters discussing debugging, creating resource files, conversion of component code from Delphi 1 to Delphi 2. (I believe there is an updated release, covering conversion to Delphi 3)

• Contents
  
  • Chapter 1, The Component Advantage
  • Chapter 2, Delphi's Object Model
  • Chapter 3, Properties
  • Chapter 4, Exception Handling in Delphi
  • Chapter 5, Component Anatomy 101
  • Chapter 6, The Visual Component Library
  • Chapter 7, An Overview of the Component Building Process
  • Chapter 8, Enhancing an Existing Component
  • Chapter 9, Graphical Components
  • Chapter 10, Custom Components from Scratch
  • Chapter 11, Dialogs and Nonvisual Components
  • Chapter 12, Data-Aware Components
  • Chapter 13, Data-Aware Business Components
  • Chapter 14, Property Editors and Component Editors
  • Chapter 15, Testing and Debugging Components
  • Chapter 16, The Professional Touch
  • Appendix A, Moving to Delphi32
  • Appendix B, The Standard Exception Class Hierarchy
  • Appendix C, VCL Source Code Declaration Finder
  • Appendix D, What's on the CD-ROM

• In Depth
  
  • Chapter 2, Delphi's New Object Model
    This chapter gives the component developer the information needed to understand the structure of a components source code. Constructors, Destructors, Forward Class Declarations are covered, along with an explaination of the difference between Virtual methods and Abstract methods. Message Handling methods are also discussed. Everything here might not sink in right away, but as you start building components, you will return to this chapter to improve your grasp of Delphi's object model.

  • Chapter 8, Enhancing an Existing Component
    Now for the good stuff! First you will build an enhanced version of the TPanel, with improved caption and border properties. Next on the to-do list is an enhanced TLabel component that gives the boring labels a new 3-d Look. Labels can be Recessed, Raised, or Shadowed. These example components are useful all by themselves, but their true purpose is to show you the power of creating your own components.

  • Chapter 12, Data-Aware Components
    This is the chapter that sold me on this book. It contains some of the only available information on the TFieldDataLink class. It is critical to understand the TFieldDataLink to build useful data-aware controls. This information, while not 100% complete, fills in critical information which is glaringly omitted from Delphi's documentation (I couldn't even find a mention of the TFieldDatalink class in the Delphi docs!).

• Recommendation
  I recommend this book to anyone interested in creating their own Delphi controls. Delphi's true object-oriented structure allows developers to turn useful pieces of code into clean, easy to reuse components. A quick look around the Internet reveals an incredible number of custom components that you can drop right into your applications. I can say from personal experience that it is a real thrill to write a component that's used by developers all over the world. This book will let you turn your idea into a powerful Delphi component.

• About the Book
  Developing Custom Delphi Components By Ray Konopka

  ISBN : 1883577470

  Published by Coliolis Group Books

  The book includes a CD-ROM that contains the source code for all the components shown in the book, as well as a large number of freeware or shareware components written by others.

  The list price of the book is US $39.00 , CANADA $54.99.

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