Lazarus 0.9.26 release notes

This page gathers the changes of 0.9.25 for the coming release of 0.9.26.

This page is work in progress. There is no 0.9.26 yet.

LCL Interfaces major changes

win32/win64

• Lazarus 0.9.24: Encoding used for strings in the LCL is ansi
• Lazarus 0.9.26: Encoding used for strings in the LCL is UTF8

LCL major changes

• Graphics (Marc will write):

 - 
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 - TIcon now creates HICON handle and thus we can finally use it to set Form.Icon.
 - new TIcnsIcon class allows to read Mac OSX icon resource files (analog of windows .ico files but for OSX)

• Greatly improved Carbon widgetset. IDE is working and you can use the form designer.
• Greatly improved Qt widgetset. IDE is working and you can use the form designer. Though under windows it works a bit unstable.

• TImageList got an ability to draw an image in 5 states: normal, highlighted, shadowed, disabled and black-white (more info here: http://lazarus-dev.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-0926-features-part-2-imagelist.html).
• ButtonGlyphs now use an internal imagelist to store glyphs and to draw them in different states (this is visible with SpeedButton and BitBtn)
• SendMessage and PostMessage were implemented for our main widgetsets only for LM_USER messages (more info here: http://lazarus-dev.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-0926-features-part-1-sendmessage.html)
• Form.Icon and Application.Icon are finally working for most of widgetsets.

IDE changes

• New icons
• TPropertyEditorHook.GetMethodName now returns an ansistring, instead of a shortstring. AddHandlerGetMethods and RemoveHandlerMethodExists now need ansistring instead of shortstring.
• Designed Forms can now reference each other. For example a form can reference the database component on a TDataModule. Formerly you could only do it in code. For more details see here.

Miscellaneous

• lazbuild: Can now build the IDE with the parameter --build-ide=. You can build the IDE with parameters: ./lazbuild --build-ide=-gh. The installed packages will be rebuilt if needed.