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I just announced in the Soft Gems Forum my decision to shut it down soon. I think it is time to move on. It's a constant security risk and there are better sources for answers on the Web.

Virtual Treeview 5.4.0 has been released and with that release I'll step back officially from maintaining the Virtual Treeview component. I moved to C++/C#/Objective-C projects a few years ago already and have hence no motivation to develop the control further. I simply don't use it anymore.

Joachim Marder and his company JAM Software has been the inofficial maintainer of Virtual Treeview for quite some time already and now we agreed to hand over the development and home. There's even a press release about this. Just to make this clear: Virtual Treeview will stay open source, under the same terms as before. Joachim will also keep the Google Code repositorie live. Only the download location for new releases has changed. See the new home of Virtual Treeview.

I will keep the old downloads alive here on Soft-Gems, but will no longer publish release news. Also the VT gallery is now frozen. I will not add any new entry there. Similar for the VT history. For now I'll stay on the VT developer mailing list (Google Group) but it is likely that I disappear there sooner or later.

This has been a long journey since Virtual Treeview's first release in June 1999. Almost 15 years! Thank you Joachim for taking over and driving VT's future a few years more.

GraphicEx has not got much love in the past years but there are still quite a number of users who still have it in their code base. This however means GraphicEx must be updated to compile with the latest compilers/IDEs. Additionally, some bug fixes have been incorporated, plus some enhancements, creating what I internally called GraphicEx II. So far however I have never found the time to publish those changes.

In order to improve that situation I placed the current GraphicEx source code on GitHub. Andrzej Borucki had contacted me to contribute some fixes for Delhi 2009 and has now worked on getting the current GraphicEx code to build there (and Lazarus). For those interested, see if that works out for you and if you have contributions to make GraphicEx work better don't hesitate to send it to me (or fork GraphicEx on Github and open a pull request there).

This is probably the last update that is also available on Google Code. Google decided to close all download sections for their Code sites. This is of course no problem for Virtual Treeview as it has its own home here and that is about to stay as long as people want to download Virtual Treeview. Joachim Marder again was the master behind this release. As usual you can read the changes on the Virtual TreeView History page.

Years ago I was working on a project that required XML files to specify a graphical user interface (GUI) based on SWT and Eclipse, written in Java. Comming from the Windows world and being familiar with resource files I thought it would be a cool idea to use those resource files (*.rc) to generate the GUI dialogs. This would allow reusing already designed dialogs to save some time. For this task I needed a parser that was able to recognize the content of resource files.

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