Delphi XE2: invisible Firemonkey controls in VirtualBox

Question

I am running Win7 x64 Pro inside VirtualBox with 2d and 3d acceleration enabled, but most controls (TButton, TStringGrid, TTabControl, etc.) are invisible inside Delphi. If I run the executable, all controls are displayed in order. How can I make controls visible inside Delphi?

This is the newly installed Delphi XE2 w / Update 3

To illustrate the problem, I took 2 screenshots:

Inside the Delphi IDE

Performing

Edit: VirtualBox version - 4.1.8 r75467

Answer 1

The problem is that Firemonkey (under Windows) uses DirectX to draw its controls.
(OSX / iOS uses OpenGL)
Prior to version 3, DirectX is not supported in VirtualBox, so you do not see Firemonkey controls.

However, the good news is that VirtualBox 3.0 (and above) supports DirectX , see: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualbox-3-directx.html
This requires installing DirectX drivers in your VirtualBox, see this article.

Answer 2

Install guest add-ons from safe mode (do not forget to select DirectX support when prompted). Make sure you are using a relatively recent (4 or newer) version of VirtualBox.

Install all Windows updates (since it is very possible that one of these updates addresses some VM related issues for Windows 7).

That's all I did, and FireMonkey works great for me both at design time and at runtime!

If you do all this and yet the controls are invisible during development ... I highly recommend reinstalling Delphi as I know others who had the same issue and reinstalling resolved them for them.