Error: Exception has been thrown by target of an invocation.

Solution: Shorten the path of the environmental variable, run SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe 

Okay. So the official vendor doesn't offer support.  We've fixed that!

Okay. So the official vendor doesn't offer support.  We've fixed that!

In 1995 Borland revolutionized the world of software development when they introduced Delphi.

It had the distinction of being the first integrated development environment (IDE) featuring a fully object-oriented language and a blazing-fast compiler that produced highly optimized, native Intel machine code. Programs written in Delphi were among the fastest in existence – and still are.

After all these years, is Delphi still relevant?

You bet it is! (And, in many cases, it is still your best bet.)

Here's why...

Back in the wild and wooly days of C/PM, DOS, and early versions of Windows, we programmers could store our data pretty much anywhere. It might not have been a good idea, but we could get away with it.

Things have changed drastically!!

If your program stores data, you need to know where it belongs, and that varies quite a bit from one version of Windows to others.

Read on to find out where your data belongs.

Need to grant EXECUTE permission to a low-permission user for all the Stored Procedures in your database?

The code in this article will do the trick for you.

In the past it's been a pain to get end-users to give developers an accurate and complete list of the steps they took to get to a problem - especially if screen-shots are desirable.

Now Microsoft has provided a tool that makes the entire process ridiculously easy.

Good quality programming books. Read on to see how I found and acquired seven of them in less than 15 minutes. Or why we love our iPads, Kindles and other mobile devices.

Delphi's TDBGrid is an incredibly useful component; one you'd expect to find in any professional development tool.

One of it's handy behaviors is that users can click in column headers and drag to rearrange column ordering to their liking.

Unfortunately, TDBGrid doesn't offer the developer any really easy way to rearrange grid columns from code. This is inconvenient because you might offer the user a choice of various columns upon which they can search, and it would be nice to make their chosen column the leftmost - at least. Often it makes sense to rearrange other columns as well.

This little class allows you to do that.

It has no exposed methods, and only two properties, so it's incredibly easy to use.

Read on to learn how it works and to get the code.

Visiting various computing-oriented stores, and certainly all over the Internet, you'll often encounter merchandise marked down significantly, and advertised as "refurbbished."

The prices are often ridiculously low, and you have to wonder if the item is any good.

Is it?

Read on for answers you might not have expected.

Network print servers are an inexpensive and great solution to a common home or office network.  Sure you can "share" printers attached to particular machines, but that creates a dependency on that machine being up and running.

With a network print server, that dependency disappears. People on the network can print without a particular machine being on and available.

They solve one other important problem, too.

The installation of the SourceGear Vault client control appears to trash SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio.

Here's the fix that worked for me.

Backups: Well know we need them and most of use at least one of the available ways to backup. If we don't, we'd be well served to ponder something Mike Prestwood recently said:

"There are two kinds of people; those that back up - and those that will."

In this article I'd like to show you an off-line backup solution that is so simple to set up and use that you'll never again have an excuse for not backing up important work.

Using spaces within database column names may be "legal," but that doesn't mean it won't make your life harder. It's legal in Paradox tables and most database systems but you might want to avoid using spaces. Here's why - and one way to use spaces if you're using Paradox tables under .NET.

Sometimes old news is good news.

If you still need to work with Visual Studio 2005, you may find yourself annoyed by that list of Recent Projects on your Start Page; a list you can't clean up - unless you want to go poking around in the Windows Registry.

The nifty little utility at this link takes care of the problem in a clean, straightforward, easy-to-use way.

Long a proprietary data store format, Microsoft is opening up the Outlook PST file format with the release of a couple new products.

If you use in Internet Router (sometimes also called a Gateway), you may face a new threat.

If you're like me, you probably love CSS, but are also a little disappointed in a few things it lacks; like constants or variables.

LESS is a fairly new bit of genius that solves some of the shortcomings in Cascading Style Sheets.

Although the .NET Framework is well "tuned" for MS SQL Server, it can also be pressed into service with other databases.

A somewhat unusual case is using ASP .NET to access and modify data in Paradox tables.  If you're going to do that, the most important thing to know is which ODBC driver to use - because you will be using an ODBC Driver.

The driver to use was created by Intersolv and bundled with Paradox v9. That driver has a version designation of v3.11

New virus targets old versions of Delphi but not the applications developed with Delphi and not the current Delphi versions, just Delphi itself. I detest the jerks that write viruses and other forms of malware.  But this one really gets my goat generally because it was a virus that targeted my favorite best-of-breed development tool and specifically because ZDNet reported the problem in a way that implies it targets applications developed by Delphi. Despite ZDNet's tag line, the virus targets old versions of Delphi (4, 5, 6, and 7) but not the applications developed with Delphi and not the current Delphi versions. I sure hope the way ZDNet chose to report this issue doesn't hurt Embarcadero, the owner of Delphi, because of a virus that attacks pre-Embarcadero versions of Delphi.

With Microsoft heavily evangelizing .NET, and Sun continuing to improve Java, many a developer and customer are torn between targeting native machine code or a just-in-time compiler.

Here we take a quick look at that particular state of the union...

Aside from the few blessed with a photographic memory, none of us can remember everything. As developers we are surrounded by complex technologies; programming languages, various SQL dialects, HTML, and CSS, to name a few. Although the Internet is a great place to find answers quickly, you often have to wade through a number of "hits" before you find the correct answer. Publisher O'Reilly & Associates has a better idea.