What's New in VCL v14.2

Join Julian M Bucknall, DevExpress CTO, as he describes the new controls and features provided in the second major release of the year in the DevExpress VCL suite. Among other improvements, he’ll cover the new gauges, the CTP of the brand new rich text editor, and the new features for the grid and the spreadsheet.

[RobertBaker]

Excellent presentation - thank you Julian.

[cld]

Great presentation Julian, thank! Hi hope in VCL PDF viewer soon enough ;-)

[MistwraitheNZ]

Thanks for the presentation. To give my feedback, I'm not that interested in a PDF viewer, it is functionality which is already well served in the VCL market and it is hard to imagine DevExpress will surpass competitors functionality without a lot of work (I would have said the same thing about the Rich Edit too but you're already working on that).

However, you suggested having a look at WinForms features so I have. The tile grid is interesting, I don't have an immediate use for it but who knows. A chart control which can work from datasets without a grid and has a lot more properties to control it would be excellent. But really what I would most like is further improvements to your existing controls. For example I saw in WinForms 14.2 that the layout control is getting a Flow layout where things automatically wrap to new lines. This please! I requested this several years ago, it would make the layout control much more useful. WinForms also seems to have some other functionality in the Map, Pivot Grid, Layout Control, etc which would also be useful in Delphi.

tldr; don't create new controls which are already well served in the market unless you can easily surpass them by combining with your existing strengths. Build upon your existing strengths and controls to make them more powerful and useful.