Installer tip

I'm really enjoying RAD Studio 10.4.2, but my journey with it got off to a less than wholesome start. I'd installed from the .iso download and put just a basic Windows platform support in. Shortly thereafter I wanted more target platforms installed so I chose Tools, Manage Platforms... and was disturbed to see this message:

O NOES!!11111!1!!!one!! (or some other geeky response)

Fortunately there was no corruption. This post is simply to pass on the tip of what to do if you happen to see this, instead of following the knee-jerk reaction of immediately uninstalling and reinstalling.

The issue here is misinformation. It's not necessarily corrupted at all - the installer displays this message if it cannot find the installation database file. When you installed RAD Studio the location of the installer file is written to the registry within this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Embarcadero\BDS\21.0\CatalogRepository

The value ServicePath in that key points to a .gof file, in my case F:\radstudio_10_4_esd_104203a.gof. The thing is, I installed from a .iso file, which I mounted to a drive (F:) at the time and had since unmounted, ∴ that path no longer reached anything. Unfortunately the installer responded inappropriately: misinformation.

I gather this issue will be fixed for the 10.5 installer, but hopefully this saves someone the trouble of an uninstall and reinstall at some point.

SAPI (Microsoft Speech API) problems with the IDE

Every few months or so someone sends me an email telling me they've speech-enabled their application with SAPI (the Microsoft Speech API) after having read my old coverage (specifically that for SAPI 5.1) from conferences in 2002 and before. It's always good to hear that stuff you've worked on is being found useful, even long after you did it, in this case frighteningly close to 2 decades ago (Ͼ˳Ͽ)..!!!

Sometimes the communications are asking how to do specific things with SAPI - unfortunately those are typically a dead end, as I haven't used SAPI in anger for a long while.

Sometimes, though, people are stuck on the basics and I was recently contacted by someone with a fairly current version of RAD Studio saying they couldn't get started at all. It turns out that the current version of SAPI, SAPI 5.4, cannot be imported into RAD Studio!

Uh-oh. Time to investigate...