A number of years ago, Embarcadero Technologies acquired Konopka Signature VCL Controls (KSVC) from Raize Software. KSVC is a powerful library of VCL UI controls. The KSVC package is available to RAD Studio customers with an active subscription, as a bonus add-on in the GetIt package manager.
Since the acquisition of the components by Embarcadero, both Embarcadero and Ray Konopka of Raize Software have been getting requests from customers on updates and enhancements they’d like to see in the components. Embarcadero has been maintaining the components and addressing customer requests.
A New Partnership
We are very excited to share that we are partnering with Ray Konopka to help us update and maintain the components going forward. Ray is the foremost expert in KSVC, and we’re excited to be working with him.
Current and future KSVC work will be focused on integrating and supporting areas of evolution of the underlying VCL library, from styling to High DPI, just to name two important areas. Nothing changes in terms of distribution, issues reporting, or support requests, which will continue to be available via the regular Embarcadero RAD Studio channels.
The Embarcadero team is very pleased about this agreement and looks forward to further improvements to the VCL library and the KSVC addon package, and would like to thank Ray Konopka for his renewed involvement in the project.
About Ray Konopka
Ray Konopka is the author of the first extensive book on Delphi components writing, an active conference speaker, and an authority in the Delphi community. His Raize Software company (https://raize.com/) created KSVC, now owned by Embarcadero, and produces the CodeSite Logging System.
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Since it is free I really feel bad to complain (seriously!).
First things first: It worked out of the box without any issues whatsoever. Thumbs up!!
The amount of components is amazing. That’s really great!
But:
The documentation seems outdated and is overall very sparse (in both layout and content). It is referring to RadStudio XE2 many times and to Windows XP (which is over 20 years old by now). Perhaps this needs some overhaul…
Also none of the appearance features of any component is working unless the property “StyleName” is set to “Windows” and the property “ThemeAware” (if existent) is set to false. It is a bit tricky (and not documented) how to get it to work.
A good direction, Marco. Even better would be if Ray Konopka and Andreas Hausladen, these top guys, would be in Delphi team not outside.
Thanks Dorian. Yes, in an ideal world we’d kidnap Ray and Andreas and keep them in our basement being 100% awesome every day. Unfortunately, they both have other jobs. I know, for example, in the case of Ray (I apologize for speaking on his behalf) he has worked successfully for The Disney Corporation for many years at a very high level and as much as he loves Delphi, he also is very happy in his role at Disney. They’re both great developers – we need some kind of secret government cloning program to recreate them so we can entice them into our development lair! 😂
I learned a lot from Ray’s book “Developing Delphi 3 Components” many years ago, specially the components streaming system that allows storing custom data like a a binary file inside a Delphi form. For me it was one of the best Delphi books besides Mastering Delphi from Marco Cantú and Delphi Unleashed from Steve Teixeira.
It would be a dream if Ray could launch a updated version including FireMonkey framework components.