Windows Vista look and feel for Delphi 2006 applications

I used a few minutes this morning to test Delphi applications with the latest Windows Vista build I've got, the 5270. I was mainly interested in how Delphi applications written with the latest release (Borland Developer Studio or BSD 2006) would work in Vista, and how they would look like.

I tested a plain Win32 VCL application with several components from the Win32 tab, such as a progress bar and a page control, to name a few.

When such an application in being run on Vista, it by default has a "Windows 2000 look", i.e. gray appearance, rectangle buttons, and so on. However, if you drop the XPManifest component onto the main form, Vista will bring your application into life with the Aero theme.

Now that is cool. The only drawback is that ShowMessage and MessageDlg still look old-fashioned. But if you call the MessageBox API functions directly, Vista will displays its white colored message boxes all right.