Delphi components for download

It would not be too much to say that I still dabble in Delphi. It is a nice platform, not quite as object oriented as I would like, but very mature. The great thing was that Delphi could do all of the things that VB could not. Like build a fully featured UI, and create COM DLLs and OCXs.

--ok point taken, technically you could create that stuff with VB, but you had to spend a LOT more time to do it, and VB had a number of limitations that could not be overcome without going down into C++. Like accessing OLEDB interfaces, you couldn't, you had to use ADO.

Anyway, over the years Delphi has collected a large number of freely downloadable component libraries that were quite usable. These were created by hobiest and professionals alike to accomplish any number of tasks. But a great number of them are specialized UI controls. A large group of them used to be commercial controls, but the parent company didn't think they were making enough money on them so the open sourced them. Here is a list of them that I keep track of on Source Forge:

• Abreva Link A compression library featuring zip, cab, tar, and others
  
• Essencials Link A lot of UI controls
  
• Flash Filer Link A SQL engine, complete with server and client controls.
  
• Lock Box Link An encryption library
  
• OnGuard Link A library for creating Demo versions of you apps
  
• Orpheus Link A monster library of visual controls
  
• Shell Shock Link A library for extending Windows Explorer
  
• SysTools Link Lots of specialized functions and procedures.
  
• Visual Planit Link Outlook style calendar controls
  
• Jedi Code Library Link From the good folks at Delphi-Jedi. Lots of visual controls, functions, procedures, classes, etc.
  
• SysEdit Link The BEST open source, syntax highlighting text editor out there. (Sharp Develop take note)
  
• DUnit Link Just like NUnit, JUnit and the like.
  

This is by no means a comprehensive list of component libraries, but it is a good start.

What this also is, is a list of things that .NET still needs out there. I love the .NET Framework and C#, but there are still a lot of things that I can do in Delphi that are not quite available yet in .NET.

Of course, maybe this is just me telling myself to get off of the sidelines and get to coding.... My wife would kill me! OK, back to hoping.