Design flaw with the Windows Forms Designer
One thing that we have always taken for granted in Delphi is a great VCL forms designer, and I am not just talking about the floating forms debate that Alan mentions in his blog what I am talking about is it’s stability and intuative design and it’s ability to handle inherited forms with ease.
The other day Jim Cooper (yet another Falafel hire, Lino is taking over the world) came accross a problem in Visual Studio with inherited forms, seems that Visual Studio cannot handle forms that inherit from forms with abstract methods, it simply cannot display the inherited form in the form designer as it requires an instance of the base form, Doh ! Anyway when Jim was cursing VS I just smiled, nodded and forgot it….doesn’t affect me right ?….nope wrong, it does affect me. I just came accross the exact same thing with Delphi Windows Forms….the design flaw is not in VS it is right in the Windows Forms Designer in the .NET framework. All IDE’s that use it are going to be affected !!
It is nice to see that the VCL designers (even if the forms don’t float any more) doesn’t suffer from this problem. Alan, maybe there is a good case to create a windows forms desgner for our IDE that rocks, like the VCL designer does.
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Posted by Tim Jarvis on June 30th, 2004 under Uncategorized |5 Responses to “Design flaw with the Windows Forms Designer”
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July 22nd, 2004 at 12:37 pm
Did not know that. Very interesting. Bear in mind, there are still some problems with VFI (e.g. collections, TFrames) that could use a fixin’ in Delphi. Let’s not forget about the Win32 guys. Win32 is going to be around a long time still.
August 11th, 2004 at 3:07 am
This issue is most probably because the CLR does not allow you to create instances of abstract classes.
November 10th, 2004 at 8:29 pm
Tim, your contact link is bouncing. Bouncing is not always a good thing!
August 1st, 2005 at 9:43 am
Tim, you know some workaround for it? I would expect that Delphi 2005 works as usual but no. My client wants the proyect in C# and with this surprise I must to design every window. How I transform a winform into component on Delphi 2005? it workaround the design flaw problem?. I put this question on the borland’s workgroup but without response yet.
September 14th, 2006 at 12:37 am
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