This site is the online home of Component Create, a free design tool and code generator that helps Borland Delphi developers produce new Delphi VCL components. You can download Component Create and its source code here.

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About Component Create for Delphi

In Component Create, you point and click to set up your component -- adding and deleting properties, methods, and events -- and then generate commented Pascal code. You can save your component definition and come back to it later to make changes.

Component Create was a commercially-sold tool in the late 1990's. (A review from the Ziff-Davis magazine Windows Sources is available here.) Although still copyrighted, it is now available as a free download at this site.

I wrote Component Create to try some ideas I had for an ideal (to me) development environment. I thought a developer should be able to browse and edit source code as if it were a database, not a plain text file. I thought a code editor and code generator should be integrated so that the developer would always start with a minimum functioning form of a method's code while in the editor. Lastly, I thought developers should be able to edit both code and documentation in a single tool and to store both in a single repository. Previous versions of Component Create demonstrated the first two of these ideas, and version 4.0 finally reflected all three.

Documentation editing and generation in Component Create works the same as code editing and generation: You enter text for each property, method, event, and variable -- or, if you don't, Component Create tries to provide it for you. Then you select the Generate | Documentation menu command to get a documentation file in HTML. Your text is saved in the component definition (.CD) file, along with your code.

Here are some of Component Create's additional capabilities:

• Importing container components from form (.DFM) files. To create a container component with multiple sub-components, lay out a panel on a form in Delphi, save the form, and let Component Create import it. You get a component that duplicates the layout you designed.
• Saving generated Pascal code as an RTF or HTML file with syntax highlighting.
• Building data-aware components.
• Building thread components. Using the provided Thread Component Toolset classes, you can build components that run in a separate Windows thread -- more easily than with Delphi's TThread class.
• Generating property editors. Component Create generates custom property editors in a variety of styles. They can be based on drop-down lists or on your own forms.
• Building components that wrap around forms. Create a component that encapsulates a Delphi form -- like a Windows common dialog, but with a form that you design. You select the form, and Component Create handles the rest.
• Adding properties that reference other components on the form. As with the DataSource property of data-aware VCL components. You just add the properties, and Component Create keeps your Notification method up to date.
• Generating palette bitmaps. A few mouse clicks, and you have a custom bitmap for your component on Delphi's component palette. Component Create generates a resource file ready for you to edit in the Borland Image Editor. You can paste bitmaps from standard VCL components to use as the starting point for yours -- the Component Create help file describes how.
• Setting the commenting level. You can choose between normal commenting and detailed commenting in the generated Pascal code.

Component Create has been used with Delphi versions 1.0 - 4.0. It should work with later versions of Delphi as well as C++Builder.

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Download Component Create 4.0

Component Create is copyrighted, but free. It is offered here without warranties.

To download Component Create, click below. Save the ZIP file to a temporary directory, extract all the files, then run the included installer (Setup.exe) to install Component Create to the destination directory of your choice. See the Readme.txt file for more information.

Download Component Create 4.0 (approx. 820K)

For more information on Component Create, you can download just the help file (also included in the full download above).

Download Component Create 4.0 help file only

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Download Component Create source code

Like Component Create itself, the source code is copyrighted, but free. It comes without warranties.

To download the Component Create source code (written in Delphi), click below.

Download Component Create 4.0 source (approx. 870K)

For a detailed introduction to the source code, you can download just the source code reference guide (also included in the full download above).

Download Component Create source code reference guide only

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Contact me

I regret that I'm not able to provide any support for Component Create or the source code. If you'd like to contact me about anything else, especially news about ports of Component Create, e-mail me at daprice - at - gmail.com.

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