Alan Colburn wrote: > I recently redecorated the GUI on an application to have the > Vista/Office 2007-style ribbon UI, using TMS's components. It looks > great and works fine. However, the resulting DFM file is large and > slows the application's startup time quite noticeably--there is a > delay of several seconds in between the time the splash screen > disappears and the main form appears.
Sounds like you're hiding the splash screen and showing the main form in the wrong order. The splash screen is supposed to distract from the fact that your program takes a long time to appear, but if you hide it before your program appears, it hasn't really done its job. > Is there anything I can do to > reduce the DFM file size or otherwise eliminate this delay, short of > deleting images and components? If you really think the delay is due to the _size_ of the DFM resource, then it could only be because of the extra time spent parsing the contents of the resource, to convert the data into class names to instantiate and property values to assign. You could skip all that by creating the components via code directly. I think the JCL comes with an add-in for exactly that -- select a bunch of components, copy them to the clipboard, and use the add-in to generate code that will replicate those components in code. I'm not sure how that took deals with images, though. You could store the images in a real image resource instead of a DFM resource. Every step you take away from using the DFM is a step away from using the visual designer. Note that although the DFM is probably stored as text in your source folder, the compiler converts it to the binary DFM format before linking it to the EXE. The binary format should be considerably smaller. You can use the convert.exe program included with Delphi to confirm that for yourself. -- Rob _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> Delphi@elists.org http://lists.elists.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/delphi
