For one of my presentations at the SDC conference last week, I did quite some work on my own Delphi wizards (Cantools Wizards), porting them to Delphi 2006 and adding a few extra capabilities, like an edit bookmarks viewer and more. The wizards are more a showcase of the technology than a set of powerful tools. Delphi's Open Tools API is very powerful, and can be used to customize the Delphi/BDS IDE in many ways (although the lack of documentation and examples is big).

Other wizards include a database form wizard that was never upgraded from the BDE, an OOP form wizard I discuss in my book, a fast way to remove ".net type safe compatibility" compiler warnings from projects, a buggy rebuild wizard (looking for projects in subfolders ahd helping in case you want to build them all), a clipboard history, a VCL hierarchy viewer, and a way to change the Objects Inspector font when giving demos. Some info (quite out-of-date) is on my stie at www.marcocantu.com/cantoolsw.

I'm looking forward to make them open source. I though about donating some of my code to others (like GExperts), but I don't know of any open source package-based wizard collection actively maintained. I can release them as they are, but fragmentation will come right away. I could start a new project (with some help) and coordinate it. Ideas and suggestions are welcome... On the other hand, I wonder if publishing some documentation of the Delphi OTA will be more useful than simpy get out some actual (uncommented) code!

PS. I started this post to discuss the Delphi OTA itself and the lack of support for building full personalities, but was dragged away while writing. Will get back to this topic another time.