IDE Toolkit

Room 3 of six

Form Designers

When the form became the program — Visual Basic's toolbox, Delphi's component palette, and what the visual designer changed about who could build software.

4 piecesAll six rooms

A Delphi 2 form designer with a TDBGrid component being positioned on a form, showing the component palette at the top and the Object Inspector panel to the right

Palette across the top, Object Inspector at the right, the component already on the form.

Photo: Steve A Johnson / Pexels

  • Two people work at multiple monitors displaying code in a dimly lit room

    Then the Form Became the Program

    Visual Basic 1.0 shipped in 1991 and made the UI form the primary artifact of development — you dragged a button onto a canvas and the event handler existed. This piece examines the form designer, the property sheet, the event model, and why the approach spread so fast among developers who were not writing systems software.

  • Two people work at glowing desktop monitors displaying code in a dim room

    Delphi's Palette and What You Could Drop onto a Form

    Borland Delphi arrived in February 1995 with a component model that let developers drop database controls, grids and custom widgets onto a form and wire them with Object Pascal. This piece covers the VCL architecture, the form designer's mid-drag workflow, and why Delphi attracted developers that Visual Basic could not.

  • A person typing at a desk with two monitors displaying code in a dim office

    Two Form Designers and What Each One Was For

    Visual Basic and Delphi shared the visual-design paradigm but diverged sharply in what they let developers build — VB's controls were sealed, Delphi's were open source you could extend. This is a direct comparison of the two approaches as they stood in the mid-1990s, named specifically and without a verdict.

  • Laptop screen showing code profiling software with memory allocation charts and file lists

    Interface Builder Predated Xcode by Fifteen Years

    Interface Builder was written for NeXTSTEP in 1988 — more than a decade before it became part of Xcode in 2003. This piece traces the tool from its NeXT origins through the Apple acquisition and into Xcode, examining what the nib file was and why the visual-design approach survived the platform transition.

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