I recently purchased Windows Vista, and found that Timeslips, a program
costing over $800 per seat, no longer works. After considerable research,
I
have learned that this has something to do with the refusal of Vista to
allow
BDE to place its files in the places it must place them on the root
directory. I have tried every alleged "tool" of Vista to try to make this
Mike Brannigan's reply is spot-on, and I fully agree with him.
To add a explanatory comment - Microsoft does not break backwards
compatibilty for no good reason. In fact, they go to extreme lengths to
preserve compatibility for old applications. Although it's not visible to
the end user, there's a engine running inside Vista - the shimeng.dll and
apphelp.dll DLLs - whose sole purpose is to tweak Vista in various small
ways, so popular older applications can continue running in the new Vista
environment. This "shim engine" adds support for literally hundreds of
applications which otherwise could not run on Vista. Designing and
maintaining the shim engine is a major dev project - reflecting Microsoft's
commitment to compatibilty. The compatibility shims are also updated via
Windows Update, as shims for additional applications become available from
Microsoft.
However .... for years, Microsoft has been heavily criticised (perhaps
rightly) for not being strong on security. In the Vista release, Microsoft
have taken security very seriously. Which has paid off, Vista is an
operating system which is actually secure enough to survive in today's
lethally virulent networked environment (and secure enough to compete with
its market rivals). By and large, this is a Good Thing; because busineses
were stuck in a continuous, expensive struggle to maintain computer security
in the face of security weaknesses in previous versions of Windows. That
struggle is by no means over, but it should be easier, less costly, and less
time consuming, as Vista becomes the common Windows base. A side effect of
this improved security is that some applications which use unsafe, insecure
practices will no longer run on Vista.
It appears that BDE is one of these. Writing files to the root directory is
a known and proven exploit, which has been used by viruses to gain control
of a computer. This is not a hypothetical precaution in Vista - it is
blocking a proven attack on your business data. By preventing apps writing
to the root directory, Microsoft is keeping your data safer.
BDE is a very old product, with an antiquated design, inefficient compared
to contemporary database products. Even in the pure Borland/Delphi world,
BDE is deprecated in favour of DBExpress. Delphi developers having been
having the "Is BDE dead?" discussion since around 2001. So it's not too
surprising that BDE-based products have reached the end of their usable
life.
Also note that Microsoft has been actively working with major (and minor!)
ISVs to start developing their applications to run on Vista, for several
years - "Longhorn" developer conferences were being run back in 2003. I
guess Sage took notice, because their current Timeslips 2008 is Vista
compatible.
If your current version of Timeslips is not suppoted on Vista by the vendor
Sage, then it would be unwise to try to "force" it to run. Imagine if you
hit some kind of data corruption and needed to get your timeslip database
recovered ... since you are in on unsuppored platform, Sage would put strict
limits on the amount of support they would provide to help you recover (like
possibly, no support at all). Running unsupported is nearly always false
economy; and agonising in a crisis.
As Mike Brannigan noted, if Timeslips is a crucial business application,
then you need to keep it supported, in either of 2 ways:
- run it on a pre-Vista version of Windows; or
- upgrade to the current version.
Microsoft has Windows XP under mainstream support until April 2009. It will
then move to more limited "extended" support, until April 2014. So there is
no urgency for you to get off Windows XP. If you have purchased new
hardware with Vista pre-installed, you may be able to downgrade the Vista
licence to a legitimate XP licence, via Microsoft. See here for details:
http://download.microsoft.com/downl...cbd-699b0c164182/royaltyoemreferencesheet.pdf
This would make it easier for you to stay on XP as your main platform, going
forward (you'll want a migration plan in place, in time for end of XP
support).
Depending on your scenario, Microsoft provides an additional free facility
which allows you to run legacy applications on a Vista PC, if the app is not
Vista-comaptible. This is Virtual PC:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx
Virtual PC lets you run an complete XP "virtual PC, in a window on your
Vista desktop. You can install applications (such as Timeslips) into the
Virtual PC, just like you would a real physical PC. This why, you can have
your legacy XP apps and current Vista-comaptible apps running side by side,
so you can alt-tab between them, cut-n-paste data, share files, etc. And you
would be running your Timeslips app on a supported platform. Not all apps
are good candidates to run in a virtual machine; but many desktop business
apps work very well in this environment. Anyway Virtual PC is a free
download, so you can try it and see. If i tdoesn't work well for Timeslips,
just through it away (note, you need to supply an XP license, just like you
would for a real, physical XP machine).
Hope this helps,
Andrew
PS: As above I strongly discourage you from trying to run Timeslips in an
unsupported environment. But for the sake of completeness .... you may be
able to reconfigure BDE so it does not attempt to write files to the root
directory. To do this, find BDEAdmin.exe, located at C:\Program Files\Common
Files\Borland Shared\BDE. Right-click the EXE file and choose "Run as
Administrator". Enter the administrator credentials. Under Native, click
PARADOX, and change NET DIR to point to some location other than the root
directory - such as C:\Users\Public\Documents\BDE_Data. This will work for
BDE itself; whether Timeslips can cope with the BDE database being relocated
to another location, I have no idea. I don't think it's a good thing to try.
But technically, it might be possible.
Thanks, brother; appreciate the feedback!