What's Next?

In this chapter, I've introduced the use of actions, the actions list, and Action Manager architectures. As you've seen, this is an extremely powerful architecture to separate the user interface from your application code, which uses and refers to the actions and not the menu items or toolbar buttons related to them. The recent extension of this architecture allows users of your programs to have a lot of control, and makes your applications resemble high-end programs without much effort on your part. The same architecture is also very handy for designing your program's user interface, regardless of whether you give this ability to users.

I've also covered some user-interface techniques, such as docking toolbars and other controls. You can consider this chapter the first step toward building professional applications. We will take other steps in the following chapters; but you already know enough to make your programs similar to some best-selling Windows applications, which may be very important for your clients.

Now that the elements of your program's main form are properly set up, you can consider adding secondary forms and dialog boxes. This is the topic of Chapter 7, along with a general introduction to forms. Chapter 8 will then discus the overall structure of a Delphi application.