Normally, writing about removing support for an older control in favor of the newer one is enough to get me worried. In this case, the VCL team have done a bang-up job to make the transition as painless as possible.
In essence, we’re making the older ExpressSideBar (no, I didn’t know we had one!) obsolescent. You should be using the ExpressNavBar instead: it has more features, looks better, and is actively maintained. To help with migrating your legacy code to use ExpressNavBar, the developers on the team have implemented a design-time converter.
The dxsbar unit has been moved to ExpressNavBar. It contains the design-time templates for the TdxSideBar, TdsSideBarStore and and TdxSideBarPopupMenu controls. Note that this means, from v2011.1.3, the dxsbar unit can be used at design time only.
Here’s how it all works (click image to expand).
On the left, you can see the TdxSideBar in a previous version of the VCL subscription. If you open the same project in the IDE with v2011.1.3 installed, you’ll see that its look has changed to a warning box stating the side bar is now deprecated and that you should convert your older code to use a TdxNavBar. Double-click on the warning box (or right-click to get the context menu shown and click on the relevant menu option), and the reference to the old TdxSideBar is changed to use the current TdxNavBar to produce the result on the right.
After the conversion is done, you should delete the reference to the dxsbar unit from your uses clause of your application unit.
Seems pretty simple to me and the results will make your apps look better.
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