Roger Cigol

It is recommended to use the same installer system (ie iso or web) as you used for your 12.2 installation

It's good to know April Fools Day is not just a British thing !

My partner, Julie, is just back from Manhatten where here hotel room was on the 42nd floor. 🙂

Yes: one of the worst things about thread safe / non-safe issues is that they do not always show themselves. A ThreadSafety issue can remain unnoticed during all your development and then you send it off to your customer and it falls over immediately. It has happened to me. Any thread work needs very careful design so that such bugs (which are the hardest to find) are avoided in the first place.

We have successfully written a 64bit C++ Builder App that ran on a Windows 10 64 bit OS and talked to an MS Access database. But you need to use the microsoft 64bit access run time driver package. This cannot exist along side the MS Access program. So either you have to uninstall MS Access before installing the 64bit driver package or you run the 64 bit application in a virtual machine with the MS Access *.mdb and other files on a drive that the virtual machine can connect to.

Embarcadero have not dropped support for MS SQL Server. It's just not in "Professional". I think "Professional" has always been limited to local databases only. MS SQL Server would rarely be expected to use just for a local database.

I think you are being a little unrealistic here in terms of business costings.

I use PostgreSQL and all seems good to me.

And yes, the viewing of data at design time using a 64bit database does work with 12.3 (certainly with 64bit versions of postgreSQL which is what I work with). The 64bit IDE is a first step. Of course we would all like it to work perfectly and to have had it a year ago but at least this shows it is coming. I am very much in favour of Embarcadero releasing stuff with limited functionality but which works rather than trying to rush too much out too quickly and therefore it all being very buggy. They have gone down this route in the past but seem to have learnt that this puts customers off. They do now seem to be releasing smaller changes at a time but smaller changes that work. I think this is much better for us users.

Thanks @Uwe Raabe I knew it had to be somewhere - and I have now found both with the help of your hints!

It seems that Embarcadero are encouraging C++ (new tool chain) users to save source code as UTF-8 with BOM. Can anyone find an option in the IDE set up to force files to be saved in this format ?

It's great to be able to use 64bit PostgreSQL interface in the 64bit IDE - You can see the database contents at design time.

Side note: very much off topic: but I love sending postcards and still send about hundred to different friends each year as I travel around.

Many thanks to all who helped - learning about the sysintern functions (handle.exe was the life saver) etc much appreciated. Special thanks to @Kas Ob. @Remy Lebeau @Der schöne Günther @Lajos Juhász

POSITIVE RESULT Having got the error code 1450 and then, very helpfully, being pointed in the direction of the "handle.exe" utility on sysintern this got us to a much better position: we could run our software and use "handle" to confirm that something was generating this continuous stream of unwanted (and presumably unused) handles which was eventually reaching some kind of windows out of resources threshold. This enabled us to (temporarily) remove parts of our code that talk to different bits of hardware and then repeat the test to check for unwanted handle production. We found that it was calls to a commercial driver for a specialist PCIe card that is used by our system that was the cause of the problem. This comes from a large respected scientific corporation, who's products we have worked with for a good many years (previously without any problems). Even better news: As part of this commercial package comes a separate test utility that allows you to check that card and driver have been installed correctly. This, too, gives the same stream of unwanted handles. So we are now able to go back to designer/manufacturer of the card/driver and show them how to spot the problem, which exists just using their own software. Fingers crossed that they will come back with a fix quickly!