Why does my custom component raise AVs in the IDE?

Question

I'm trying to write a simple component that will allow you to embed one or more SDL rendering surfaces on a Delphi window, using the SDL 1.3 APIs. It will compile and install just fine, but when I try to use the component in the form designer, it raises AVs whenever I try to access its properties in the object inspector, save the form, or delete the component, and placing one on a form then trying to run gives a linker error: it apparently can't read the DFM properly for whatever reason.

The DLL can be found at http://www.libsdl.org/tmp/SDL-1.3-dll.zip and the source code to my component can be downloaded here. SDL.pas is a JEDI-SDL header file; the rest is my own code.

I don't see any reason for this to raise AVs in the form designer. If I dynamically create the control at runtime I don't have any stability issues. Can anyone take a look at this and maybe provide some feedback that might help me clear it up?

Answer 1

You can debug this yourself. Open the package project that contains your component. Then go to Run|Parameters and enter the IDE itself as the Host Application. Run the IDE from within the IDE. Then repeat your steps to reproduce the AV, and the IDE should stop and show you where things are failing. You can use normal debugging techniques from there.