DevEx VCL Components & VCL Styles??

[Ian Branch 135]

Do the DevExpress VCL components play nicely with VCL Styles?

If not, can they be made to?

 

Regards & TIA,

Ian

[gkobler 48]

DevExpress have his own Styles, i use this for my programs. I don‘t know i you use the Delphi Styles if it works with it

[Anders Melander 1979]

5 hours ago, Ian Branch said:

play nicely with VCL Styles?

can they be made to?

No and no.

[corneliusdavid 242]

I'll second both previous comments. I'm helping my team upgrade a suite of old programs that used a mix of grids and controls; the new version is DevExpress Quantum grids to the mix. We wanted to support a "dark" mode and it took a lot of research to get everything to look decent together--or at least close. We had to pick both a VCL style and a DevEx skin that (mostly) work together. They're saved and applied in completely different ways.

[KenR 30]

Using the WXI skin it is very easy to emulate Windows light and dark modes with just a few lines of code.

[Vincent Parrett 832]

Not many complex third party components work with VCL styles, either because VCL Styles are too limited/buggy, or because they already did their own thing long before VCL Styles were released. 

[Stefan Glienke 2131]

There seems to be an adapter to apply VCLStyles to DevExpress components: https://www.almdev.com/prods/stylecontrols/stylecontrols.html - I have no experience with this but at some point we will have to look into this as customers keep asking for Dark mode in our application 😎 🙈

[Alex7691 19]

I have a huge application in production using VCL Styles and the package mentioned above: https://www.almdev.com/prods/stylecontrols/stylecontrols.html

 

The adapter works well with DevExpress grid and other controls like their different tree views. That's all we use from them. We decided to use other StyleControls components (buttons, date editors, page controls) instead of DevExpress ones because:

1) they play well with VCL Styles

2) Their code is much simpler and in general any issue you find can be fixed by yourself in a couple of  hours (compared to days to impossible to fix in DevExpress). It's clear that the author just wants to create something that does its job and works well, instead of trying to use every single pattern in any Gang of Four book.

3) They are lightweight insted of the Dx famous kitchen-sink design

I strongly recommend it if you are going down the VCL styles route (disclaimer: I'm not related to almdev company)

 

Cheers,

Edited April 1 by Alex7691

[Almediadev Support 89]

On 4/1/2025 at 8:38 AM, Alex7691 said:

I have a huge application in production using VCL Styles and the package mentioned above: https://www.almdev.com/prods/stylecontrols/stylecontrols.html

 

The adapter works well with DevExpress grid and other controls like their different tree views. That's all we use from them. We decided to use other StyleControls components (buttons, date editors, page controls) instead of DevExpress ones because:

1) they play well with VCL Styles

2) Their code is much simpler and in general any issue you find can be fixed by yourself in a couple of  hours (compared to days to impossible to fix in DevExpress). It's clear that the author just wants to create something that does its job and works well, instead of trying to use every single pattern in any Gang of Four book.

3) They are lightweight insted of the Dx famous kitchen-sink design

I strongly recommend it if you are going down the VCL styles route (disclaimer: I'm not related to almdev company)

 

Cheers,

  Thank you for the opinion. StyleControls VCL now is a key product, which you should have if you are using VCL Styles and want to create a real modern UI.  

 

StyleControls VCL support all the new features of RAD Studio Athens and also improves applying of VCL Styles:

 

•  TscFormTabsBar control - our solution of default TFormTabsBar (TCustomForm.VisualManager), which can be used with TCustomForm.CustomTitleBar solution also
•  Tile View support in our TscListView control, which can be fully customized and VCL Styles can be applied for all elements
•  Interaction with Skia VCL for Lottie Animations and SVG support 
•  TscStyleManager component - improves appling of VCL Styles for Forms, Menus and Common Dialogs + advanced features (for example, menus can be with background image, alpha transparency, headers and look more correctly than default solution).

Edited 13 hours ago by Almediadev Support