component-design

How do I make a control that can't contain other controls?

I'm designing a custom control, and every time I have it highlighted in the form designer and then pick another control from the control palette, the new one ends up inside my control, as if it were a TPanel or TGroupBox. This isn't what I want, so how can I keep it from happening? ...

Guidelines/principles for package and component design.

Alright, our visual studio solution grows big in terms of the number of projects in it. Except for things that are obvious, I want to check whether the way it is now is what it has to be or we can better reorganize/package it. Do you know of any good text on guidelines, principles of package and component design that I can reference? ...

Avoiding the need to call ProcessMessages

I've got a component I created that embeds a hardware-accelerated renderer in a TWinControl so you can place it on a form. It works pretty well in most cases, but if I try to resize the control, everything goes blank until the message loop runs and calls the WndProc for the renderer, which is hosted in an external DLL. This means that ...

Why won't my control accept keyboard input?

I've built a custom control that I'm trying to send input to. It will accept mouse input and report MouseDown, MouseMove and MouseUp correctly, but for whatever reason, it won't accept keyboard input. When I click on it, it doesn't receive focus, and any keys I press get interpreted by whatever control had the focus already. This is p...