C++Builder 5 Developers Guide

In this chapter, we've touched on the various elements of the Tools API such as wizards, notifiers , services, creators , and editors. We have provided some practical examples on how to use the Tools API. The more you play around with the Tools API, the more comfortable you'll become in hacking and extending the IDE. (Note: Always hack responsibly). If you come up with an idea that adds a great new feature to the IDE, you're encouraged to build it, wrap it up in a DLL, and share it with the rest of the Borland community. That way we all benefit, Delphi developers included.

There's no doubt Borland has provided a fairly significant piece of technology in the Tools API. Being able to extend an IDE's capability using COM-like interfaces is a clever approach for Borland allowing their engineers to more easily add improvements to their development environments as well as opening the door for third-party developers to provide new IDE plug-ins. One of the benefits is that a DLL that hosts an IDE extension can be designed to work for future releases, as long as it's not dependent on any Native Tools API interfaces. The bottom line is that the flexibility of the Tools API can be used to further the capabilities of your C++Builder IDE ”and that's a good thing!