Raize Components has been around for a long time, and enjoys a great reputation among Delphi developers. Written in 100 per cent Object Pascal code, you can compile them right into your application without worrying about external DLLs or nasty dependency issues. Version four adds support for Delphi Studio 2006, the latest incarnation of Borland’s flagship development system.

One of the great strengths of Raize Components has always been the emphasis on design-time support. In other words, these components don’t just look great in your finished application, but the associated designer tools in the IDE make it easy to create the effect you want. The innocent-looking TRzLabel control hides a host of features such as drop shadows, an embossed effect, rotation through an arbitrary angle and more. By right-clicking the label on the form and selecting ‘Edit Label’ you invoke a designer window from which you can adjust the custom properties and instantly preview the result. In fact, there are over 100 different designers in Raize Components and you get the source code to them all, as well as that of the components themselves.

A nice addition to Raize Components 4 is the Quick-Design Form option on the form editor, which makes it possible to instantly build templates for several popular types of form. Just right-click on the design-time form (you don’t even need to put any Raize components on the form), select ‘Quick-Design Form’ and then choose an option, such as a form with two panes divided by a splitter, toolbar at the top, status bar at the bottom – all created through a single step.

Another nice feature is the rich set of built in images contained in the Raize library. If you’ve ever shelled out money for a third-party glyph set, you should appreciate the fact that Raize Components has over 130 professional quality, 256-colour images ready to drop onto your toolbar.

Online documentation is included, as is a huge mega-demo (with source code) that shows off the various components. Personally, I would have preferred to see a number of smaller demo projects here for the sake of clarity, but nevertheless the demo source code is instructive in helping you get the best from the toolset.