As you have surely understood by now, FireMonkey is a completely new graphics library that allows a completely new way of thinking about your GUI. During my FireMonkey training, one of the first exercises that I gave to the class was: Please look for the strangest FireMonkey control in the Tool Palette. It is quite a strange exercise, but the reason for this is really important: you must realize as soon as possible that FireMonkey is not a cross-platform VCL; it is a new beast with new possibilities and new things to know. So, you have to rethink your GUI architecture because many patterns used in the last 5, 10, 15, or more years of VCL development now may be simply obsolete or are no longer the best things to do. For instance, you have to display a pie chart with some user interaction and some nice visual effects. When the user moves the mouse over a pie slice, the slice gets highlighted and some information is shown to the user. How can you achieve this?
In VCL, there are two ways: write your own code (a lot of it) or use a third-party control. In FireMonkey, there is also a third way: use primitive shapes to create it using no third-party controls and a very small amount of code. This is a recurring pattern in FireMonkey. This is the reason because your FireMonkey application needs fewer third-party controls than the VCL one. To show you how this is possible, in this recipe we'll create a simple pie chart with such aspects and user behavior. Here's a screenshot of the application we'll build:
