Watch out when using Form Derivation in VCL.Net

This is another case where it's important to examine the implementation in greater detail than accepting the fact on the face value.

Both VCL.Net and Win Form, including Delphi Win Form, support form inheritance. But their implementation and deployment support models are poles apart.

In Delphi, you must ship the source code of your base forms to your customer in order for them to derive from it and to author their derived form in the IDE. In order to view each derive form in the IDE (D2007 included), you must first open its ancestor form in the IDE. Otherwise you'll receive am error dialog box.

This is only the requirement of the IDE. The framework works fine at runtime if the controls on the derived form are created and rearranged dynamically at runtime.

Contrasting this to Win Form, even Delphi Win Form in D2006, there is not such requirement to ship source code. To derive from a form packaged in another assembly, all you need is to reference that assembly and that's all to it.

So it's important when comparing features to look deeper than the glossy brochure.