As good as Delphi is, it does have a number of shortcomings, one of being that Borland has never added Unicode support to the otherwise excellent Visual Component Library. When the company made the move to .NET, one might reasonably have expected it to add Unicode support. Alas, no. Bizarrely, Delphi 2005 will now enable you to compile source code containing Unicode characters, but this is totally irrelevant from an end-user perspective.

TntWare, a small husband and wife team, has created a free set of Delphi components called TntWare Delphi Unicode Controls. With these controls, you can add Unicode support to your applications. Interestingly, Troy and Tammy belong to a Christian missionary-based organisation, and these controls were developed as part of an application that enables missionaries to keep track of those who support them in various ways.

The controls are compatible with Delphi 5, 6 and 7, and support for Delphi 2005 has recently been added. Once installed, you’ll end up with no less than five new pages on the ‘Component Palette’. These contain drop-in replacements for most of the Delphi components on the ‘Standard’, ‘Additional’, ‘Win32’, ‘Data Controls’ and ‘Dialogs’ pages. There are no extra properties to worry about; the key point is that all the string properties associated with each control are of type ‘WideString’ instead of ‘String’, and each control has been rewritten internally so as to be Unicode aware.

On the negative side, there’s no polished install program. You have to manually install the relevant design-time package into the IDE, though any seasoned Delphi developer should be able to do this without any trouble. In the same way, there’s no online help, but you don’t really need it. Each control behaves just like its ‘plain vanilla’ counterpart with the exception of being Unicode aware. If you run into trouble, the full source code of all the controls is included.

An important aspect of the TntWare Delphi Unicode Controls is that they’ll run on any 32-bit version of Windows all the way back to Windows 95. Unicode is only supported in the OS for Windows NT and derivatives (Windows 2000, XP, etc). In other words, you’ll be able to run a program built with the TntWare controls in Windows 95, albeit without without Unicode functionality.

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