Borland C++ Builder v1.0
Click here to install Borland C++ Builder for Win95/NT

IMPORTANT: This is the full program, but see the licence agreement for details of distribution and other restrictions.

System requirements and contact details for C++ Builder are at the bottom of this page


We've included a collection of freeware and shareware components and sample programs for Borland C++ Builder. Some of these may be used as-is, others can give you useful pointers for your own programs.

You'll find the software in the folders c10free and c10share below the \full\cbuilder folder on the SuperCD. Please note that these programs are not tested or supported by us or Borland, and you use them at your own risk, just as if you had downloaded them from the Internet.

Thanks to the Delphi SuperPage for these files!

If your looking for the C++ competition answer and you're a Windows 3.1 user

What is C++ Builder? Here's the PC Plus review by Dave Jewell from issue 127: C++ meets Borland Delphi

When you first fire up the C++ Builder development system, you'll probably think you're using Delphi. Not only does C++ Builder feature all the same components that you'll find in Delphi 2.0, but it also shares a lot of the design-time code with Delphi as well.
If you're familiar with Delphi, and you also speak C++, then you'll be building applications within a very short time. For those who haven't previously used Delphi, C++ Builder comes as something of a revelation. Much of the legendary complexity of the Windows API is hidden behind the face of Borland's VCL (Visual Component Library), thereby making many programming tasks much more trivial than they previously were.

For example, suppose you want to display a bitmap in a window, but you don't want the background colour of the bitmap to be displayed - you want it to become transparent. This is dead easy with VCL, the whole thing taking just one call to a method named BrushCopy. To do the same thing with 'barefoot' API calls would involve a great deal of cumbersome code

 C++ Builder includes a very rich set of drop-in components which you can seamlessly A big plus point for C++ Builder is the much improved on-line help documentation. Delphi was roundly chastised for having very poor help files, and this got even worse when Borland first released version 2.0 with lots of broken links and missing topics in the help files. This has now been fixed (more or less), and the on-line documentation has been completely redone for C++ Builder. When developing C++ Builder, Borland was faced with a tough decision. It needed to add some proprietary extensions to C++ in order to make it work with the component-based, property-oriented VCL library. Should it keep C++ as an industry language, or should it add some new keywords to support the needed functionality ? The final result was a compromise; the dialect of C++ used in C++ Builder includes proprietary new keywords such as __property. You can distinguish between Borland keywords and industry standard language features by checking for the two underscores at the front. As with Delphi, C++ Builder includes the BDE (Borland Database Engine), Database Explorer program and a rich set of data-aware controls Documentation has been much improved in C++ Builder, with new help files covering the VCL, the RTL (Run-Time Library) and an on-line Borland have rewritten a number of Delphi sample programs for C++ Builder. This is the well-known (Threads) demo, which uses separate threads to implement three different sorting algorithms. integrate into your applications without (in most cases) the need for extra DLL's. However, there is a price to pay for all this productivity and (canned) functionality. Applications created with C++ Builder will be considerably larger than an API-only application, and comparable in size to those built using Visual C++. However, because of the size of the new Visual Basic 5.0 run-time library (1.3 Mb!) it's likely that a C++ Builder application will be considerably smaller than the equivalent Visual Basic program.

As with Delphi, you can create your own components using C++ Builder itself and then install them on the Component Palette for reuse in your own applications. Understandably, many Delphi developers sell their components to other programmers and the same will almost certainly happen with C++ Builder. A major selling point of C++ Builder is its ability to re-use existing Delphi code. Those 100-odd bundled components don't just look the same as Delphi controls - they are Delphi controls. Ever since Delphi 2.0, Borland's Pascal compiler has been able to generate .OBJ files, and these can be used directly from inside C++ Builder. This means that you can now re-use both controls and complete Delphi forms inside your C++ Builder project.

C++ Builder in Action

Creating a C++ Builder application is basically a question of adding one or more components to a form, changing their properties to suit your requirements and then gluing the whole thing together by writing one or more event handlers which respond to mouse clicks, key-presses and other (events). The system contains the same set of data-aware components that you get with Delphi 2.0, so you can create powerful database front-end applications with very little (and sometimes zero!) coding. Because C++ Builder is designed for the 32-bit Windows API, you get full access to advanced API capabilities such as threads - a demo program is included which demonstrates three different sorting algorithms using three independent threads of execution.


 Other API capabilities such as registry usage are neatly encapsulated into reusable VCL objects, making them much easier to program than they'd otherwise be. On the negative side, C++ Builder isn't as sprightly as Delphi. This is an inevitable consequence of using C++, which involves a more complex (and slower) compiler than Pascal.
In order to speed things up a bit, Borland has chosen to use the same incremental linking technology that's found in its regular C++ development system. While this makes for a more rapid development cycle, it generates several megabytes worth of intermediate files which sit around on your hard disk until you specifically delete them.
If you're short of disk space, use incremental linking and have several projects on the go at once, then you'll need to keep a careful eye on all those intermediate files. From a technology point of view, C++ Builder is at about the level of Delphi 2. It includes all the Delphi 2.0 controls, and implements form inheritance, but doesn't support packages (Delphi 3's ability to create tiny executables by putting the VCL code into a .DLL) or the ability to make reusable component groups.

Our VerdictFor many developers, implementation language is the key issue. Those who've worshiped Delphi from afar but didn't fancy getting tied into a single-vendor language will no doubt be very enthusiastic about C++ Builder. The fact is, this product represents a quantum leap in technology when compared to competing C++ development systems.


Contact: Borland UK Tel: +44 (0)118 932 0022
Price: As sold for รบ80 including VAT. Click here for details of upgrade to Borland C++ Builder 3.0 Fax: +44 (0)118 932 0017
System requirements: 486 PC or higher, Windows 95 or NT 3.51/4.0, 16Mb RAM (24Mb recommended), approximately 75Mb hard disk space. WWW: http://www.borland.com
Limitations: None in the software, but see the licence agreement E-Mail: desk@borlandinfo.co.uk
UnInstall: Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0: Use the Add/Remove Programs applet in Control Panel. Windows NT 3.51: Click the Uninstall icon in your C++ Builder program group in Program Manager. Serial Number : Not required