Delphi 2009 (beta): Ribbon Controls

Whenever I get a new version of Delphi, I create a plain VCL Forms Application and browse the tool palette.

I love what I found with a first glimpse! There is a tab called “Ribbon Controls” that contains 5 additional VCL Controls to allow you to build applications with Ribbon support.

• TRibbon
• TRibbonComboBox
• TRibbonSpinEdit
• TScreenTipsManager
• TScreenTipsPopup

In order to get known with the functionality, I opened the Ribbon demo, which also is included with Delphi 2009. This is what the demo looks like in the VCL Forms Designer:

As you can see the most interesting fact is that the Ribbon Controls integrate in to the well-known VCL ActionBand and ActionList logic. This will make it very comfortable to add Ribbon support to existing applications.
Furthermore, you can drop any VCL control in a Ribbon Group, but there are also special Ribbon Controls, like TRibbonComboBox which adds grouping support to a combo box. Have a look at the screenshot….

Designing a Ribbon is very easy as the designer offers menu items in the context menus to add pages and groups.

All in all, this looks like a cool feature!

This post refers to a beta release of Delphi 2009. Features might look different or be omitted in the final release