Referencing 3rd party components in Delphi 2005

Question

I'm quite new to Delphi and I'm helping a team setting up a build server which are using Rad Studio 2005.

They have just bought DevExpress VCL and wants to use these. I would rather not have the component installed on the build server, but instead having them as a part of the source code and making sure that the project is using that version.

How is that done in Delphi?

Answer 1

We compiled all of our 3rd-party stuff into a BPL, then put that .bpl and corresponding .dcp and .dpr/.bdsproje into source control, so it gets delivered to the build server. Works well. In retrospect, it should have been a series of BPLs, divided by vendor, so that we could upgrade individual components/libraries without having to run regression tests on everything else.