Delphi 2006 Hidden COM Registry Entries

Somewhere in the drafts was a note to refer to an old Chris Bensen blog post on the Embarcadero server: blogs.embarcadero.com/cbensen/2005/12/07/22388

Alas, a lot of Embarcadero stuff is gone, some because of Idera not caring, others because as of Codegear, the team never was good at keeping infrastructure alive, nor cater for proper archiging at the Wayback Machine.

Luckily, the Borland days were different, as I found by browsing web.archive.org/web//http://blogs.borland.com/: almost 10k archived pages!

Searching for cbensen or 22388 then got me the actual post [Wayback/Archive] Delphi 2006 Hidden COM Registry Entries (the last link is dead, the others not indexed by search engines) and quoted below while adding some formatting:

If you use COM in Delphi 2006 here are a few hidden registry entries that allow you to customize how the COM features work a bit.

BDS\4.0\Type Library\EmbeddedTypeLibraryEditor = True / False

If you liked the floating type library editor then create this registry entry and set it to “False“.

BDS\4.0\Type Library\DefaultPersonality = CPlusPlusBuilder.Personality / Delphi.Personality

Since Delphi 2006 supports Pascal and C++ the Type Library code generator sometimes can’t make up its mind. If you want to help it in those cases then create this registry entry and tell it which personality to use.

BDS\4.0\Type Library\AxRegMenuCheckFile = True / False

New to this release is smart “Register ActiveX Server” and “Unregister ActiveX Server” menu items where they are only enabled when they should be. Well sometimes that isn’t entirely true, so create this registry entry and set it to “True” to change the behavior so if the .tlb file exists then the menu item is enabled.

BDS\4.0\Type Library\TransactionalWizards = True / False

The transactional wizards didn’t make the official release and didn’t get any testing, but if you’d like to try them out then create this registry entry and set it to “True”.

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk.

posted on Wednesday, December 07, 2005 3:16 PM

If you are interested to browse through all his Borland blog posts, then start at [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen (final archived blogs.borland.com post).

Right after that, the server moved to the codegear blogs server with the announcement that his blog had moved to his Blogspot sub-domain: [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen

[Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen

Monday, January 15, 2007

This Blog Has Moved

Because of the amount of spam I’m getting from this blog I have moved my blog and the content. I am still a member of the Delphi development team so only the location of my blog has changed. To start reading my blog from it’s new location please point your web browsers to chrisbensen.blogspot.com and update your RSS feed to .

Not all posts made it through, read back from the above linked final blogs.borland.com post.

After 2020, Chris started mostly blogging on Medium: no new Delphi content, but a very interesting journey including the largest Raspberry Pi cluster in the World: [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen – Medium.

More on that cluster: [Wayback/Archive] Building the world’s largest Raspberry Pi cluster – Gerald on IT

NB: Back when making the note on Chris’ post, I wasn’t aware [Wayback/Archive] Delphi 2006 Instalação Componentes | Info Master Control had this:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland\BDS\4.0\Type Library]
New -> String Value
"ActiveXWizard"="True"
"TransactionalWizards"="True"
"AxRegMenuCheckFile"="True"
"EmbeddedTypeLibraryEditor"="True"
"InteropCheck "="True"
"DefaultPersonality"="Delphi.Personality"

--jeroen