BS Controls

BS Controls: The Modern WinUI Component Suite

What began as a clever helper unit has now been completely re-engineered into a professional, native component package for Lazarus (LCL) and Delphi (VCL) applications. Instead of wrapping panels, BS Controls consists of true, dedicated components descending directly from TCustomControl.

This transition provides pixel-perfect rendering, robust event and focus handling, and seamless IDE integration. Designed around the elegant WinUI design language, BS Controls brings a sleek, modern, and theme-aware aesthetic directly to your Component Palette.

🚀 What’s New in BS Controls?

• True Custom Controls: Built on a clean inheritance hierarchy starting from TBSCBase (TCustomControl), you can now compose your UI visually in the IDE designer. Lifecycle and memory are managed natively by the form/container owner!

• WinUI Aesthetics: Sleek text boxes, memos, masks, dropdowns, and numeric spin edits featuring focus-sensing bottom borders.

• Embedded Action Buttons: TBSCMaskEdit and TBSCEdit features an integrated Unicode/Wide character button (ideal for search or clear actions) with a dedicated OnButtonClick event.

• Custom-Drawn Selectors: TBSCCheckBox and TBSCRadioButton are custom-rendered for a native WinUI Hero look.

• Monochromatic Theming: BS Controls offers a simpler, lightweight approach for theming. Using just three core settings (Color, Font.Color, and IsDark) manageable via TBSCManager, you can instantly toggle and control your app's look.

1. The Core Architecture & Theme Control 

All visual controls inherit from TBSCBase (TCustomControl), ensuring a unified foundation for painting and mouse tracking. Because they are native components, you simply drop them onto your form, and the IDE handles their ownership and destruction naturally.

The Non-Visual Manager: TBSCManager

Instead of handling memory lifecycle, the Manager acts as the brain for your application's UI theme.

Centralized Theme Switching: Changing themes manually control-by-control can be tedious. The Manager allows you to update the entire look of your application with a single method call by pushing updates to three core properties across all linked controls:

1. 1. Color: The primary background/surface color.

   2. Font.Color: The text color for proper contrast.

   3. IsDark: A boolean toggle that adjusts internal rendering (like hover shades and focus borders) to perfectly match Dark or Light modes.

2. WinUI Input Suite

These components provide a striking modern Windows aesthetic, featuring thin borders on the top and sides, and a dynamic, color-changing solid border on the bottom when focused.

• • TBSCEdit (Mimics TEdit): Focus-sensing border, Embedded Unicode Button (Left/Right, OnButtonClick).

  • TBSCMemo (Mimics TMemo): Multi-line text input.

  • TBSMaskEdit (Mimics TMaskEdit): Masked data input.

  • TBSCComboBox (Mimics TComboBox): WinUI styled dropdown selection logic.

  • TBSCSpinEdit (Mimics: TSpinEdit): Integer entry with integrated modern spin buttons.

  • TBSCSpinEditFloat (Mimics TSpinEditFloat): Floating-point number entry.

3. Custom-Drawn Selectors

Decoupled from legacy OS controls to guarantee a consistent, pixel-perfect modern look.

• TBSCCheckBox (Mimics TCheckBox): Custom-drawn check box with modern WinUI Hero geometry.

• TBSCRadioButton (Mimics TRadioButton): Custom-drawn circular radio button.

4. Buttons & Toolbars

Button Hierarchy

• • TBSCButton (Mimics TButton)

  • TBSCBitBtn (Mimics TBitBtn)

  • TBSCSpeedButton (Mimics TSpeedButton)

Container: TBSCToolBar

• • Transforms a container area into a toolbar.

  • Built to naturally host and layout TBSCSpeedButton instances.

5. Containers & Grouping

• • TBSCGroupBox (Mimics TGroupBox): Draws a clean, theme-aware border around a section to neatly organize related controls.

Explore the Package and Demo

A comprehensive demo project is included in the package, showing how to install the 13 visual controls and 1 non-visual component into your Lazarus/Delphi palette. It demonstrates setting up the TBSCManager to instantly toggle Light and Dark themes, and how to utilize the focus-sensing WinUI inputs.

I hope BS Controls becomes your go-to suite for building modern, elegant applications! I would love to hear your comments, suggestions, or critique.