There is a "feature" of Delphi 2010 that I don't stand, the new Description Pane of the Object Inspector. Don't take me wrong, I'm impressed by the improvements of the product and haven't even opened Delphi 2009 in a few months now. There are many improvements and I really recommend moving to Delphi 2010. But there are also a few things I don't like (but I do have a fix, though).

This is a small area at the bottom of the Object Inspector offering a description of the selected property (like it happens in Visual Studio, I guess). However, there is no description ever displayed, only an empty area with the property name repeated, like you can see at the bottom of the Object Inspector for the Caption property of TButton:

You might start looking for a way to get rid of it. There is no option. Nothing to right click. Nothing in the detailed Options page of the Object Inspector. What about making is smaller by dragging the slider at the top? YOucan end up with only half a line. Better, but quite ugly:

The solution? There might be a hidden registry setting or something, I ended up writing some code in a design time package to locate the Object Inspector (which is the form called 'TPropertyInspector'), select its 'DescriptionPane' component, and forcing its height to 0. The effect is the pane is now totally gone:

Out of the dozens of great new features in Delphi 2010 (many of which I mentioned in this blog and other have covered in details) this one is rather annoying. It is another half-done help mechanism, much like Help Insight. We badly need improved help in Delphi, not only by having complete help files (I still keep my fingers crossed for those), but providing better integration with the IDE. This Description pane and the Help Insight are tools going in the right direction. Too bad that comments in the new areas of DataSnap and dbExpress don't follow Help Insight own conventions as they started doing in Delphi 2007. At times I think this side of Delphi is somewhat helpless... but still hope to be proved wrong.

In any case, getting back to the main topic of this blog post, if you use Delphi 2010 and want to get rid of the Description pane you can add to a design time package the unit available as NoInspectorDescriptionPane.pas.