VCL — Year-End Roadmap (v26.2)

The following list outlines features/capabilities we expect to ship for our VCL UI Component Libraries - Delphi & C++Builder (expected release date: December 2026). As you will see below, accessibility (A11Y), developer productivity, and blazing fast pixel-perfect rendering for high-resolution displays remain cornerstones of our long‑term VCL product strategy. As always, our intent is also to reduce day‑to‑day development friction and help you build and maintain complex VCL applications more efficiently.

Before I detail our VCL Roadmap...if you have not yet done so, please take a moment to review What's New in v26.1 (our last major VCL update) and submit feedback using the inline survey. Your survey responses (both in the What's New and in Roadmap posts such as this) help us better understand your needs/concerns and allows us to make more informed development decisions. As always, thanks to everyone who has already submitted feedback/suggestions.

Security — SBOMs and CRA Readiness

If you deliver software in the EU, the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) will require a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM — an inventory of every component inside your solution) as part of your conformity documentation. The CRA and its associated regulatory regime will go into effect on December 2027. Each software application/solution manufacturer must fulfil SBOM-related obligations. DevExpress-authored SBOMs will help customers document/inventory DevExpress libraries used within a DevExpress-powered app.

We released a preview version of DevExpress-authored SBOMs in May 2026 (for our .NET NuGet packages). SBOMs for CRA Compliance in DevExpress-powered Apps describes what the files contain and how to feed them into tools such as Dependency-Track, Trivy, and Grype.

With v26.2, we expect to ship DevExpress VCL SBOMs, and make them available to active license holders. 

Accessibility — Microsoft UI Automation, and Keyboard Navigation Enhancements

As you may recall from previous announcements, accessibility (A11Y) support remains a primary focus area across all DevExpress product libraries. Our accessibility strategy continues to be driven by the following principles:

• Make our UI components and related software libraries more accessible for people with visual impairments (via narrator/screen reader apps such as NVDA or Narrator).
• Ensure that applications built with our UI components are easily testable using automated UI testing and enterprise-scale end‑to‑end frameworks powered by UIA (such as Ranorex).
• Help our customers comply with existing A11Y-related regulations in regions such as the US and Europe (Section 508, EN 301 549, EAA).

Full VCL accessibility support is a large undertaking and requires a significant engineering investment. In 2026, we expect to finalize primary accessibility-related enhancements for the VCL platform. These will include, but are not limited to extended accessibility support in the following components (track our progress here):

• Remaining data editors, navigation and utility components (such as TdxStatusBar/TdxRibbonStatusBar, TcxDateNavigator, TdxNavBarOfficeNavigationBar, TcxMRUEdit, TdxColorEdit, TdxTokenEdit, TcxImage, TdxBarCode, TcxPageControl/TcxTabControl, etc.)
• Spreadsheet, Rich Text Editor, Vertical Grid, PDF Viewer, Scheduler, Reports (basic UI element voicing during navigation)

Accessibility and Compliance — PDF Engine Enhancements

We've begun a significant PDF engine refactoring initiative: changes that will impact the DevExpress VCL Printing System, TdxPDFViewer, TdxPDFDocument and other dependent components. This development will likely continue into 2027 and should address the following objectives: 

Accessible/Tagged Document Export

Currently, VCL PDF controls export to PDF 1.4 - we will expand support to the PDF 1.7-2.0 family. We want our PDF engine to produce tagged PDF documents for those who use screen readers and other assistive technologies (similar to what is available in .NET).

With this change, VCL components can export documents that conform to the following standards: PDF/UA, PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-3a. That is not an option for applications serving government agencies and regulated industries across the EU - they require accessible invoices and other PDF documents.

E-invoicing Standards

We also want our PDF engine and dependent components to fully support Germany’s ZuGFeRD e-invoicing standard (ZuGFeRD v2.3.2). With it, developers can attach ZuGFeRD v2.3.2 XML files to PDF documents (similar to the PdfDocument.AttachZugferdInvoice method in our .NET offerings).

AI — VCL Coding Skills

We are developing AI agent skills to help you build DevExpress VCL applications using AI coding agents. The skills will encode DevExpress best practices for popular VCL components and development tasks.

In the meantime, we recommend that you use DevExpress MCP documentation server with Embarcadero Kai for RAD Studio, GitHub Copilot in VS Code, or Claude Code. 

VCL Reporting and BI Dashboard Enhancements

VCL v26.2 release plans include the following key initiatives for both ExpressReports and ExpressDashboards (a part of the new VCL Subscription +): 

Additional VCL Template Kit Options

We will add new templates under the "Reporting & Data Analytics" category of our VCL Template Kit. As a result, it will be much easier to configure your reporting/data analytics application as a constructor (rather than copy code from multiple GitHub examples/docs manually). 

VCL developers will be able to choose templates with different data sources, report layouts (table, master-detail, side-by-side subreport), layout storages (DFM/database table/file system), display modes (like Tabbed MDI or embedded) report viewer.

Extended Learning Materials

We expect to deliver additional examples/tutorials for both VCL Reports and Dashboards (data shaping, filtering, etc.). You may have already viewed new help topics under our Getting Started sections.

Additional AI-Powered Functions

DevExpress VCL Reports already includes multiple smart functions (like report generation from a prompt). We hope to derive even more from our DevExpress .NET Reports and BI Dashboard platforms to the VCL.

Performance and Usability Enhancements

We will refactor our VCL backend to optimize memory usage, startup time, and document rendering speed.

In document previews, we will also replace our legacy TdxActivityIndicator with the newest TdxSplashFormManager-based loading indicators (to help with perceived performance).

Fluent UI Support — Replicate Modern Microsoft Outlook and Teams User Interfaces

As you probably know from our v26.1 announcements, we continue our work to align DevExpress-powered VCL applications with modern UI standards inspired by Microsoft Fluent 2 and recent Outlook and Teams apps. Our v26.2 plans include the following:

• Infrastructure/core changes to support our internal Icon Library and Fluent icon rendering (the engine should automatically select a suitable icon size based on rendering context/attributes).
• Enhanced WYSIWYG design-time experience for Fluent Ribbon UI with the Office Navigation Bar, skin selector, and search toolbar.​
• Updated Image Picker design-time experience to better support Fluent icons with new sizes and attributes (check this sketch).
• New project and form templates (for the VCL Template Kit).
• Updated Mail Client demo.

VCL Template Kit — Additional Project and Form Templates

As you know, v26.1 includes our VCL Template Kit - designed to quickly create common application types and frequently used UI forms. The Template Kit ships with both project and form templates, allowing you to scaffold complete applications or add new forms and modules to existing projects.

With v26.2, we will add additional templates for many popular tasks (Fluent UI forms, splash forms, additional reporting app configurations). We will also support template-specific options in the right panel (like the reporting options I mentioned earlier - see our mockup below).

VCL Splash Screen Manager Enhancements

In v26.1, we introduced a VCL Splash Form Manager (CTP) designed to simplify the creation and management of loading forms (TdxSplashFormManager).

With v26.2, we will add more professionally designed Splash, Wait, and About forms (for VCL developers to choose from). We will also integrate these built-in forms into the VCL Template Kit (currently, splash form management is available under the DevExpress Application Settings menu).

VCL Demo Source Code on GitHub

All DevExpress VCL show-case / product demos will be available on GitHub (similar to what we did for .NET/JS). You no longer need to install our demos locally to explore these sample projects. This streamlines access to source code and unlocks numerous GitHub capabilities (such as repository search or forks,).

You can browse, clone, and run demo projects with your existing tools and workflows on any operating system. You can also use demo projects as reference materials for AI coding assistants.

Your Feedback Matters

As always, we welcome your feedback. Should you have specific questions related to our v26.2 release, please submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center.

Thanks,
Dennis Garavsky
Principal Product Manager
dennis@devexpress.com

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