marcocantu.blog

Delphi 13.1 Released Today

2026-03-18T05:39:45.502Z

As you can read in the official announcement blog post at https://blogs.embarcadero.com/announcing-the-availability-of-rad-studio-13-florence-update-1/, Embarcadero has released a new version of RAD Studio, Delphi and C++Builder. The top new feature is the addition of a Delphi native Windows on Arm compiler, based on the LLVM toolchain.

You can read more at the Embarcadero Web Site page for RAD Studio 13.1, https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/whats-new-in-13-florence and in the detailed What’s New in 13.1 page in DocWiki at https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Florence/en/13_Florence_-_Release_1.

The doc wiki also includes a list of the publicly reported bugs fixed in DocWiki at

https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Florence/en/New_features_and_customer_reported_issues_fixed_in_RAD_Studio_13.1

That's all for now. I'm very excited for this release and very happy to have one more target platform and one more Delphi compiler in the box. Hope you'll like it.

Sign up for Thursday Event: What’s Coming in RAD Studio 13.1 Florence

2026-03-14T22:04:16.814Z

As Embarcadero is getting closer to the release of Delphi 13.1 Florence, C++Builder 13.1 Florence and RAD Strudio 13.1 Florence, the company has organized an event for Thursday this week, to introduce the new features and the improvements of the new release. If you are actively using the product, or using an old version and interested in what's going to be available, tune in the event.

The session will cover everything in the new relrease, and offer a significant opportunity foir questions, if you join the live presentation. I'll be there explaining what's new in Delphi. Don't miss it and sign up here .

31 years of Delphi, tomorrow

2026-02-12T13:00:52.884Z

Delphi is 31 years old, tomorrow. Great history. I won't repeat the usual celebration with the usual old time pictures. You can find plenty on my past blog posts like:

https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2025-february-delphi-is-30.html
It's 29! Delphi, I Mean
Delphi 28th Anniversary
26 Years... of Delphi (with now and than comparative images)
Delphi is 25!
24 years of Delphi... and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today!
22 Years of Delphi and it Still Rocks (with a lot of advertising pages from magazines of the time)
It's Delphi Birthday
Delphi 18 Birthday Video
16 Years Ago in San Francisco
15 Years of Delphi
12 Years of Delphi

Earlier this week I joined a webinar hosted by Embarcadero to celebrate. Ian hosted it and David I was there along with a few others... I joined and shared a ten minutes video showing the original 16-bit Delphi IDE, running on 16-bit Windows and producing a 16-bit application, a 32-bit IDE producing a 32-bit application, and 64-bit version of Delphi generating a 64-bit application. They all had the same source code, safe for a minor change and styling enablement. At the end.... I showed a native Delphi app for a new, coming platform.

The entire video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAemnBbn-MQ

(For my 10 minutes video jump to minute 29, or following this link)

My interview at ITDevCon 2025

2026-01-29T10:38:15.458Z

At the ITDevCon 2025 conference organize by BitTime in Milan last November I was interviewed by Daniele Teti. It's 19 minutes discussion about all things Delphi, past, present and (some) future. I hope it's informative and enjoyable.

The video is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwH5VE-5eIA

My Year in Cities 2025

2025-12-29T07:57:06.080Z

This is my end-of-the-year blog post listing places I've visited in 2025 for at least one night, plus some daily trips worth noticing (and marked with *), in chronological order. At times, the reason for the trip is listed:

Verona (Italy)
London (UK) for the Embarcadero event
Antibes (France)
Amsterdam (Netherlands) for the Delphi Summit
Courmayeur Mont Blanc (Italy)
Trieste (Italy)
Bovec (Slovenia)
Vrsic Pass (Slovenia)
Ljubljana (Slovenia)
Koper (Slovenia)
Warsaw and Mszczonow (Poland) for a Delphi Conference
Florence (Italy)
Milan (Italy)* for ITDevCon
Genova (Italy)*

Some trips were family vacations, some to Lego events, some work-related travel. We'll see what next year will take, for the time being, let me wish you a great 2026.

My Niklaus Wirth Award Acceptance Talk at International Pascal Congress 2023

2025-12-28T08:19:01.199Z

In 2023 at the first International Pascal Congress organized by the University of Salamanca, Spain, I was given the Niklaus Wirth Award. I gave an acceptance speach, covering the history of Pascal, but from a very personal perspective. I blogged the presentation text and images, at the time: https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2023-july-niklaus-wirth-prize-acceptance-speech.html

Now the organizers have finished editing and uploading the content of the video of that session. You can find it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skzo7Yj16K8. It's a long session (the video is almost one hour) and visually it's fairly boring (it has me reading and slides on the side)... but it can be interesting to lsiten to it if you've been into Pascal or Delphi for as much of your lfie as I've been.

Notice, that the conference is being organized again in June 2026.

My 13 Top New VCL Features in RAD Studio 13

2025-12-04T16:05:24.290Z

Following up on my last week "My 13 Top New FireMonkey Features in RAD Studio 13", this is a similar blog post focused on the VCL library. While there are no new brand components, there are very significant improvements to existing ones, opening up additional opportunities to create modern looking applications for Windows 11 just using the build-in controls.

Again, my "13 Top Features" list is a personal selection of changes I find impactful. It's a personal list, as the title implies, as there are other new features you might find more interesting than what I've selected. Also notice that this list is focused on new features, but the R&D team also addressed a large number of issues and inconsistencies, and worked on platform APIs and integration.

VCL 1: TitleBar Styling and More Controls

The TitleBarPanel in Ganymede supports custom VCL styles. In other words, the release adds support for drawing styled controls in the title bar area, a feature requested since the TitleBar was introduced a few years ago.

In addition, there is a new TTitleBar.StyleColors property to enable automatic use of the VCL Styles colors for background and buttons on the title bar. The support includes using the following controls on the TTitleBarPanel (non-styled and styled): TButton, TSpeedButton, TCheckBox, TRadioButton, TToolBar, TEdit, TComboBox, TFormTabsBar, but also TActionToolBar and TActionMainMenuBar.

See also the preview blog post covering this feature at https://blogs.embarcadero.com/coming-in-florence-titlebar-styling-and-scrollable-actionmenus-in-vcl/

VCL2: ControlList Improvements

The ControlList component supports a new type of hosted control, the SplitButton. Notice this can be seen in action in the IDE in the GetIt package managed dialog box.

To implement this, we added The clbkSplitPushButton and clbkSplitToolButton styles for the TControlListButton control. You can change this value in the Style property of the component. The TControlListButton control has a DropDownMenu property to associate the menu.

There is another ControlList enhancement: a OnGetItemHint event and a ShowItemHint property to offer per-item hints, rather than global control hints.

VCL 3: Improvements to FormsTabsBar component

RAD Studio 13 Florence offers several improvements to the FormsTabsBar component, introduced in RAD Studio 12:

Transparency support with the new Transparent and ShowBottomLine properties.
A new OnGetTabCaption event making the control more flexible.
The TabFromPoint and TabIndexFromPoint methods are now public, for additional customization
A new MouseMiddleButtonClose property offers the option to close a tab with the middle mouse button (it's disabled by default).
The term has also fixed mouse wheel scrolling.

Overall the enhanced FormsTabsBar component and its ability to be displayed in the Titlebar makes it very easy to use the VCL library to build Windows applications with contemporary UI.

VCL 4: EdgeBrowser

This release updates the interfaces to the Microsoft WebView 2 control (aka Chromium-based Edge) to version 1.0.3296.44 of the WebView2 SDK.

In addition we updated the TEdgeBrowser component (and the matching demo) to support AddWebResourceRequestedFilterWithRequestSourceKinds.

In general terms, TEdgeBrowser offers an easy-to-integrate and modern web browser, with full programmatic control (including the integrated JavaScript engine) within your VCL applications.

VCL 5: WinUI 3 Demo

This release refreshes the WinUI 3 headers and the standalone WinUI 3 demo, which were previously available as a separate download from GetIt and are now integrated into the core product demos. YOu can see the demo also at:

https://github.com/Embarcadero/RADStudio13Demos/tree/main/Object%20Pascal/VCL/WinUI3/WinRTExample

VCL 6: ActionMainMenuBar Scrolling

We have added a new scrolling feature for the TActionMainMenuBar control, which is enabled when the vertical height exceeds the screen height. This has been a long time request by developers, but complex to implement due to limitation of the underlying Windows platform control.

You can see an example of this feature in action below.

Notice that this is also potentially used by the RAD Studio IDE, in case it's executed on a very low resolution screen.

VCL 7: Removed leftover Win98 code

I know this can look like a minor change specific, but I think it's important we trim code specifric to very old unsupported versions of the operating system, as they add weight to the VCL and are really not needed any more. This is not meant to prevent running VCL applications on very old versions of Windows, but stop surfacing specific features for those versions, superseded in newer releases.

VCL 8: Improved the TToggleSwitch control

We have improved the UI of the ToggleSwitch control, to make it look more aligned to the current UI in Windows 11 toggle switch. We've also been updating some of the VCL "Windows 10" family of styles to modernize them a bit -- even if they are called "Windows 10" they support Windows 11.

Here you can see some platform and styles ToggleSwitch control, in the off and on state, at design time (remember, you can have styles at design time in VCL and you can have multiple controls painted with different types in the same form!)

VCL 9: More Flexible Category Buttons

The CategoryButtons control is a little used, but very powerful, UI element. The RAD Studio IDE uses it, for example, for the Tool palette (see below). We added Visible and Enabled properties of TButtonItem (the individual elements) and TButtonCategory.

VCL 10: Form Border in Styled Apps

I know that this will look like a minor extension, but the form border style depends on the actual style in use, when using VCL styles. The addition of the new TStyleManager.FormBorderSize property makes it possible to customize this very visible UI element.

VCL 11: Chancing Calendar Selection

Somehow, it was always easy to track changes to the selected data in the Month Calendar component. Now there is a new specific event, TMonthCalendar.OnChange. If you use the component, it can be handy!

VCL 12: New TCanvas Overloaded methods

The TCanvas class is at the heart of the classic GDI graphic rendering in VCL. (As a reminder, VCL also supports Direct2D painting and the Skia graphic system.) The TCanvas class now offers new overloaded methods with take a TPoint parameter, rather than two separate coordinates:

AngleArc
Draw
LineTo
MoveTo
FloodFill
TextOut

VCL 13: Tracking the Splitter

The Splitter control has been in the VCL for a long time. It is used to let an end user change the relative surface of two adjacent controls. The controls offers a few ways for tracking the customer resize operations, and we added two new events:

OnBeforeResize
OnAfterResize

This makes it easier to enforce a specific logic when the user resizes a control

The VCL Library Keeps Improving

As you can see in this blog post VCL keeps improving in terms of features and quality. RAD Studio Visual Component Library is by far the best and most complete Windows client library available in the industry, with long term support for your code base combined with the adoption of the most recent Windows API and UI features.

If you are building Windows client applications, it's hard to find anything better, considering also the minimal deployment size, the non-existent runtime dependencies and associated security risks.

After looking at FireMonkey and VCL, stay tuned for more blog posts with lists of features in other RAD Studio libraries.

My 13 Top New FireMonkey Features in RAD Studio 13

2025-11-27T15:44:48.650Z

Even though it has been a couple of months since we launched RAD Studio 13, C++Builder 13 and Delphi 13, we at Embarcadero haven't really blogged about the new features in the runtime libraries. For this reason, I'm writing a few blog posts focusing on different areas and starting with the FireMonkey library.

Now there are many new features, very complex ones (some of which have been covered a bit more) and smaller ones. My "13 Top Features" list is a personal selection of changes I find impactful. It's a personal list, as the title implies, as there are other new features you might find more interesting than what I've selected. Also notice that this list is focused on new features, but the R&D team also addressed a large number of issues and inconsistencies, and worked on platform APIs and integration.

FMX 1: New ApplicationEvents component

RAD Studio 13 introduced a new TApplicationEvents component, which makes it much easier to handle application wide events, without having to manually create an event handler and wire it up. Just drop the component on a design surface (even a non visual designer) and add even handlers:

Notice that while the concept is similar to the VCL counterpart, the actual events are different and depend on the FMX applications lifecycle. In the example captured in the picture above, I'm handling the OnOrientationChanged event, which is generally used on mobile.

FMX 2: OnCheckedChange

There is a new OnChangeCheck event for a ListBoxItem in a ListBox control, as shown below:

FMX 3: TComboEdit AutoComplete

The TComboEdit component now supports autocompletion while typing, similar to VCL TComboBox. As you type, the control suggests the first items in the list matching the current input. In this case, the combobox has a list of numbers, and typing "t" suggests "two":

FMX 4: Reverse TrackBar

The TTrackBar control has a Reverse property, which allows the reverse of the trackbar direction.

FMX 5: Mouse Wheel for Trackbar

The same TTrackBar control now also supports mouse wheel scrolling, instead of keyboard scrolling. Notice that a reverse trackbar still scrolls in the expected direction.

FMX 6: New Alignments

The TAlignLayout enumeration includes new alignment options for centering controls, on top of a very long list of existing alignment options. New alignment modes include:

TopCenter, like TAlignLayout.Top, centers the control horizontally
TopLeft, like TAlignLayout.Top, aligns the control to the left.
TopRight, like TAlignLayout.Top, aligns the control to the right.
LeftCenter, like TAlignLayout.Left, centers the control vertically.
LeftTop, like TAlignLayout.Left, aligns the control to the top.
LeftBottom, like TAlignLayout.Left, aligns the control to the bottom.
RightCenter, like TAlignLayout.Right, centers the control vertically.
RightTop, like TAlignLayout.Right, aligns the control to the top.
RightBottom, like TAlignLayout.Right, aligns the control to the bottom.
BottomCenter, like TAlignLayout.Bottom, centers the control horizontally
BottomLeft, like TAlignLayout.Bottom, aligns the control to the left.
BottomRight,like TAlignLayout.Bottom, aligns the control to the right.

FMX 7: Hints and Styles for BindNavigator

The navigator control used in Live Bindings, TBindNavigator, offers the option to configure a specific Hint and Style for each of the buttons of the navigator, using the subproperties of the ButtonsOptions property.

FMX 8: TPresentedScrollbox Improvements

The TPresentedScrollBox control has a new set of properties for the user to control the scroll animation, the bounces, and the touch interaction:

The property AutoHide defines whether scrollbars are automatically hidden when the scroll is done.
The property Bounces indicated whether it is possible to scroll the content beyond the borders.
The property ScrollAnimation enables or disables the scrolling animation
The property ScrollDirections defines the available scroll directions
The property TouchTracking indicates whether the control responds to touch events.

There is also a new IsVisibleChild method, which the team used to optimize TScrollBox and TPresentedScrollBox rendering.

FMX 9: Memo TextPrompt

RAD Studio 13 adds a TextPrompt property to the TMemo control in FireMonkey. This is used for placeholder text when the control's text is empty. Works like the TEdit counterpart. You can see an example below:

FMX 10: The New Display Link Service

This is a fundamental change to FireMonkey, which would deserve its own detailed blog post.

The new Display Link Service is now the central engine for all application animations, entirely replacing the legacy timer-based engine previously used. This frame-accurate system leverages the display's actual refresh rate to synchronize and drive all UI updates and animations. By utilizing platform-native APIs such as JChoreographer (Android) and DisplayLink (iOS), the service ensures that animation processing is tightly aligned with VSync events, resulting in smoother and more consistent visuals across all platforms, especially on high-refresh-rate and modern mobile devices.

This improved stability and smoothness of animations is visibly noticeable: by giving greater stability to the renderer, it makes animations more fluid. This is a significant change and enhancement, bringing FMX animation on par with, and in some cases, faster than other mobile solutions. This improvement is visible across all target platforms and GPU drivers that FireMonkey can use.

FMX 11: Flexible Menu Item Height

The height of menu items (TMenuItem) used to be a constant value. Starting with RAD Studio 13, the user can add a TStyleTag object with StyleName="height" to the TMenuItem style and specify the menu item height in the Value property.

FMX 12: Even More Emoji

We added support for the 16.0 version of Emoji symbols

FMX 13: A New MaskEdit Control

There is a brand new MaskEdit control for FireMonkey, which works similarly to the VCL counterpart. It includes a specific designer for input masks, to help define the input rules. You can see this property editor at design time in the image below:

There is only one significant difference, compared to the VCL version of the control, in how incorrect input is managed by the TMaskEdit in FMX. In the FireMonkey implementation, rather than raising an exception if the current value in the MaskEdit is not valid, the control fires an OnValidateError event. It's recommended to handle this event to provide any visual feedback to the user about invalid value. For example, you can highlight the field with a red outline, add an accompanying label about an incorrect value, or even throw an exception, as in VCL control. If the value is still incorrect after the focus is reset, the control remains in an invalid state, and the OnChange event is not triggered until the value becomes valid.

FireMonkey Keeps Improving

As you can see in this blog post FireMonkey keeps improving in terms of features (and quality, something I've not highlighted here) and while we are adding VCL-like controls and components, we try to do so in a way that offers more flexibility and it can work fine also on mobile. Some of the features, like the improved animation support, are mobile-first. The goal remains to offer a multi-device framework and the ability to have a single source code across desktop and mobile, but at the same time offer everything you need for building mobile-only or desktop-only applications.

Stay tuned for more blog posts with lists of features in other RAD Studio libraries.

Catching up on Delphi 13 Additions

2025-10-23T19:28:53.928Z

On September 26, Embarcadero released RAD Studio 13 September Patch -- see https://blogs.embarcadero.com/rad-studio-13-september-patch-available/
The same day, the company introduced a new "SmartCore AI Components Pack" -- see https://blogs.embarcadero.com/introducing-the-smartcore-ai-components-pack/
On October 6th, Embarcadero also released InterBase 15 -- see https://blogs.embarcadero.com/embarcadero-interbase-15-released/
Finally, I wrote a quite long and detailed blog post about Windows 10 EOL, which offers a fairly long list of features Delphi offers to help you modernize existing applications for Windows 11: "Windows 10 Is No Longer Supported by Microsoft – Are You Ready For Windows 11?"

New Delphi Upgrade Advisor

2025-09-21T14:54:24.922Z

The "Delphi Upgrade Advisor wizard" for RAD Studio 13 is a new tools that enables developers to identify meaningful changes to project configuration and code, significantly improving compilation time and the overall code tooling experience. The wizard is available as a separate GetIt package.

You can read more details, based on a practical example at:

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/introducing-the-delphi-upgrade-advisor-wizard/

Notice that the code refers advice already made available, for example in this blog post:

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/some-suggestions-to-help-the-delphi-compiler/

If you have a large, old application, it's worth running the tool over it, and see what it suggests, including spotting nested circular unit references.