DevExpress - VCL – June 2025 Roadmap
February 26, 2025 - The following list outlines features/capabilities Devexpress expect to ship for VCL UI Component Libraries - Delphi & C++Builder (expected release date: June 2025).
Before I detail our VCL Roadmap...if you have not yet done so, please take a moment to review What's New in v24.2 (our last major VCL update) and submit feedback using the inline survey . Your survey responses (both in the What's New and in Roadmap posts such as this) help us better understand your needs/concerns and allows us to make more informed development decisions. As always, thanks to everyone who has already submitted feedback/suggestions.
Accessibility, UI Automation and Keyboard Navigation Enhancements
As you may recall from previous announcements, accessibility (A11Y) support is a primary focus area across all product libraries. VCL is no exception in this regard. Our strategy is driven by the following principles:
- Make our UI components and related software libraries more accessible to people with visual impairments.
- Comply with existing A11Y-related regulations in countries like the US, Germany, etc.
- Ensure that apps built with our UI components are easily testable using automated testing/e2e software (this is important for both external customers and us internally).
Full VCL accessibility support is a large undertaking and requires significant development resources. Our efforts will continue throughout 2025 and will include enhancements for major unsupported components:
- Form layout manager (including layout groups, tabs).
- TreeList and Data Grid (key navigation, read-only and data editing scenarios, without other complex interactions).
- Other popular data editors (key scenarios in both in-place and standalone use editors).
We expect to introduce improved accessibility support to the DevExpress VCL Scheduler/Pivot Grid (and other controls) by the end of 2025. Our VCL demos will also have accessibility support enabled by default in v25.2.
RAD Studio 12.3 Support
As you probably know from Embarcadero's public announcements, RAD Studio 12.3 Athens is coming soon. As always, it requires us to test and modify our release artifacts:
- Design-time packages and tests (due to architectural changes).
- Licensed and trial installations.
- Internal build farm and related development tools.
Form and Control Rendering Performance Enhancements
First, a reminder to review our v24.2 release notes (details related to performance optimizations) and test v24.2 live with our demos or within your projects. You may be surprised that certain DevExpress-powered VCL forms now open faster (even without DirectX) than the same in .NET WinForms.
Performance enhancements to skinned forms (with vector skins and SVG icons) continue to be a part of our long-term VCL product strategy . In our v25.1 release cycle, we have isolated a new set of use-case scenarios requiring optimization (based on feedback via the DevExpress Support Center and internal research).
Dark Mode at Design Time
We also want to improve developer UX and modify DevExpress tool windows to match IDE styles (for example, apply a dark theme to DevExpress dialogs and wizards).
Simplified Application-Wide Skin
Having started in 2024 with our VCL Ribbon component, v25.1 will make it easier to apply the global TdxSkinController and project settings ( learn more ) to the following controls:
- Layout Control (no need to deal with TdxLayoutCxLookAndFeel or TdxLayoutSkinLookAndFeel any longer for controls added inside the layout component).
- Navigation Bar (refresh the design-time experience, hide older styles, and avoid extra steps with SkinExplorerBarView, AccordionView and other views).
- Bar Manager (a single-row bar menu, status bar).
For the majority of VCL developers, changes will produce fewer errors and offer simpler configuration steps for common usage scenarios (see examples: one , two , three ). This should not affect customers who prefer advanced/ad-hoc skin customizations or where a global skin is not required.
More Control over the Enabled/Disabled and Small/Large SVG Icons
This is one more feature from our 2024 roadmap , which we had no time to implement in our v24.2 release cycle. In short, we want to expand UseRegularAsLarge , LargeSize and related SVG image options to other controls like Button, Backstage View, List View, Navigation Bar, Image Combobox, etc. For additional information, please review the following Support Center ticket .
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration Research
We expect to leverage/integrate AI chat and other "smart" functions from our .NET libraries (like Smart Paste, Search, Summary, Translation, etc.) for both the DevExpress VCL Rich Text Editor and VCL Data Grid.
A Simpler Way to Save/Restore the Grid and TreeList State
I am pretty sure many of you are familiar with our obsolete KB articles (KA18654 and A2279) and associated custom 'cxStatusKeeper' implementation/package. At least one can easily google more than 100 tickets with various keywords over the years (and I can see even more with private Support Center tickets). Some of our users are still using these solutions today with RAD Studio 12, and it takes their time to upgrade and maintain.
In v25.1, we want to simplify the following save/restore layout requirements:
- Save and restore expanded, selected, focused, and top visible nodes/records into a file/stream.
- Support our Data Grid's table and banded views and the TreeList.
- Support design-time or easy plug-and-play runtime experiences.
We hope to get started with the VCL Data Grid (refactor and simplify existing code, see which APIs can be added out-of-the-box, etc.) and then see how it goes for our TreeList (may be delayed to v25.2). Ultimately, our hope is that you will have much less code to copy and maintain in your own project(s).
As always, we appreciate your feedback on what you customized in our default example solution, what proved to work well and what did not. Thanks in advance.
A Preview of the Report Designer and Report Viewer
In v25.1, we plan to ship a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of our hybrid VCL reporting solution powered by the DevExpress JS Report Viewer/Designer . With this implementation, reports can be created, designed and previewed inside VCL apps and stored in a database/file system as JSON/XML when necessary. This is a new solution/implementation for the VCL framework and is based on v24.2-related research (hybrid VCL components - aka JS/DevExtreme Wrappers - see our proof-of-concept with the HTML Editor here ). Technical prerequisites to run this solution include ASP.NET Core and a WebView component (an embedded web browser) for Microsoft Windows.
Licensing: Our new reporting solution will require the purchase of our yet to be announced " VCL Subscription + " OR an existing active VCL Subscription with any .NET subscription that includes DevExpress Reports for ASP.NET Core/JavaScript (relevant subscription SKUs include: Reporting, ASP.NET and Blazor (includes DevExtreme), DXperience, or Universal).
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