Be coherent with the Windows look and feel using TTaskDialog

Version after version, the Windows OS changed its look and feel a lot from mid-2009 when the first Windows 95 came out. Also, the UX guidelines from Microsoft have changed a lot. Do you remember the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) paradigm? It was very popular in the 90s, but now is deprecated and an application using seems old, even if it has been released. Indeed, many Windows applications seem stuck in the past in terms of UI and UX.

What about dialog? Our beloved ShowMessage and MessageDlg have been there since Delphi 1, but now, the modern Windows versions use different dialogs to communicate to users. Many of the standard dialogs contain more than a question and a simple Yes and No. Some dialogs ask something and provide a list of choices using buttons; others have a nice progress bar; others have a nice button with an extended explanation of each choice just inside the button. How can our Delphi application benefit from the new dialogs offered by the OS? In other words, how can we create a coherent look and feel for our dialog windows so that our application does not look old? This recipe shows you how to use the TTaskDialog component.