Theme-ing applications in Delphi XE

Question

Does anyone know if it is possible to apply custom themes to Delphi applications. Example, changing the default colour, font, tab styles, etc. of a whole application (i.e. set of forms) at once. Kind of like css files for webpages.

Answer 1

Change the color and font of most of the vcl controls is relative easy to do, you can iterate over all the controls of a form and then set the propertiesFont and Color for each control. Now to customize the drawing of a VCL control you must owner draw each control your self. Another way is using a skinning library which do this for you, for example try the VCLSkin component which let you skin the entire application with no need for modifications in your VCL controls. Btw the new incoming version of Delphi (XE2) has great changes in this area introducing FireMonkey and VCL Styles.