The end result is that if you open a project and for some reason the controls get resized... I used a graphical diff tool that showed both versions and allowed

The end result is that if you open a project and for some reason the controls get resized... I used a graphical diff tool that showed both versions and allowed to revert unwanted changes with a couple of clicks. I think it was WinMerge. Also, I never opened the DFM designer unless I was going to make a change. Top and Left need to be published properties, even for non-graphical components, so the designer can place them somewhere without covering one another. That's why they're declared so deep in the hierarchy. The serialization code is one of the nicest parts of the framework. I was tasked once with translating an old and messy application. Translation tools, including the one by Borland, included in the enterprisey versions, were utter crap. I hacked the serialization code to extract the relevant strings into an Excel that we sent to the guy doing the translation and then use his output to create different DFM sets, all of them included in the exe, and selected when starting the application. Actually everything about the IDE was great, there was a comprehensive API to make plugins ("experts") for the IDE, mostly undocumented, but Ray Lischner wrote a couple of great books about it and some nice guys created a set of useful utilities with source.