I am venturing into making my own components in Delphi. I'm having difficulty getting started with component development.
I want to make a composite control ie a control made up of several other controls, eg like an address form or something like that.
I am descending from TWinControl. Would that be considered to be the correct choice?
The main thing is, I cannot see a way to visually design the component in D2010. Is this possible? eg drop some text boxes onto your component, as you would with a form. I'm hoping I don't have to hand code all the visual aspects to my own components..
Also any good links on delphi component dev would be very much appreciated - esp for composite controls. The docs are not A1, its a struggle. I searched a lot already, I'm still going nowhere fast.
If you're making something with multiple controls such as an address form, you might consider making it a frame instead of a control. Frames can be designed like windows, and re-used.
You'll have to describe it in code to compile, but you can use a trick to design the component visually at first.
Put a TPanel on the form, and let that stand for the base control. Arrange your sub-controls, then get the properties from text view. GExperts adds a menu option that will convert controls on a form to code to generate them automatically, making this step a lot easier.
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