Status of Virtual Treeview port

It has been more than one year after the last blog update about the Virtual Treeview (VTV) port and some people may be asking what happened with it.

The port is far from dead. In fact, it is fully working under Win32, Gtk1/2 and Qt since, at least, the previous six months. I was just waiting to the Lazarus 0.9.26 release to do an official release. Lazarus 0.9.26 is out, so where is the new VTV?

One of the main features of Lazarus 0.9.26 is the Unicode support for Win32 interface that, in your turn, uses UTF8 encoding. Currently VTV supports Unicode by using UTF-16/WideString and was working fine. After the LCL Unicode switch some encoding conversion problems appeared when iterating with strings returned by databases or LCL controls, so i decided to anticipate the migration to UTF-8 before doing a release.

This task is not trivial and i'll start to work on it only after December, so don't expect an release soon.

This has some advantages:

• There will be no need to further string types changes (WideString -> String) in applications created with the released component
• It will be faster since WideString is known to be slower specially under Win32

Anyway if someone is interested in testing the component check the instructions on how to use the svn version here. Be aware that a change from WideString to String type will be necessary in the long run.