We just upgraded to CodeGear RAD Studio 2009 in the company – I gave up after BDS 2006 and its overpriced upgrade paths and after noticing the direction the Delphi community was headed – and what does it require? JSharp 2? What the heck is that for? I wouldn’t normally expect either Delphi or C++ Builder to require it – and those were the only two choices of “personalities” to install.
Alright, so downloaded and installed it (fortunately the installer does most of that transparently). But now come the two annoying points:
- The documentation clearly states that when prompted, I should take a backup of the downloaded ZIP files and that the prompt would ask me where to save them. Alas, there was no prompt. So I presume in two years when CodeGear has released version 2011 or even 2012 of their RAD Studio, there’ll be no way to install version 2009 of it anymore. 😕
- Even though the installation was electronic delivery, that is downloaded, I didn’t receive the latest version. To my surprise the check for updates does actually show all the available updates, which also means they weren’t already installed in the first step.
Alright, so I set out to contact CodeGear and the next adventure began. To find an entry into what used to be the BDN is tedious at the very least. The subdomain dn.codegear.net is no more registered in DNS and consequently doesn’t provide an HTTP redirect to the correct location either. Now, the search for “DN CodeGear” yields this website as the first match (the second one being dn.codegear.com, note: .com instead of .net before), so I followed this, but had no luck logging on with the credentials that I had verified just yesterday. Alright, so I chose to get a password reminder just to find out that no such account exists. Too bad. Oh yeah, sorry, … just the wrong “developer network”. Should have been the CodeGear one, right? So I go to dn.codegear.com just to be redirected back to where I came from. CodeGear, this is a mess! Is this an approach to keep the number of support requests small by simply making it impossible to contact support? In 2007 I was contacting the Borland support using support at borland dot com as the email address and all worked fine, now I can’t even be sure any of the email addresses still exist, if even a subdomain is so volatile. Do I have to re-register using the EDN website now or what?
Borland, Inprise, Borland, CodeGear, Embarcadero (did I get the order right?) … changing web addresses and names kills communities.
// Oliver (a grumpy and currently dissatisfied user)
Update #1: Alright, so it turns out codegear.net was never meant to be public (see the comments). And meanwhile I got two replies from the support at embarcadero dot com and most of the issues seem to be sorted out now. Also see the comments.
I never set up a redirect for dn.codegear.net because it has never been a valid public URL for the Developer Network.
It used to be community.borland.com, then bdn.borland.com and temporarily bdn2.borland.com. Then it became dn.codegear.com, and we also redirect cdn.codegear.com, bdn.codegear.com, cgdn.codegear.com, and edn.codegear.com. All of those now redirect to edn.embarcadero.com.
Here’s the redirect pattern.
From: http://(?:bdn|bdn2|cdn|dn|cgdn|community|edn).(?:borland|codegear).com(?’URL’.*)\z
To: http://edn.embarcadero.com${URL}
Some of those patterns will no longer work because Borland retired some of those DNS entries, and some of ours were never linked anywhere.
Also, the same account you had with BDN, and CDN, will work just fine with EDN. If you’re having trouble logging in, it’s not something related to any of our domain changes. We still support https://members.borland.com because Borland has a contract with us to do so, and https://members.codegear.com and https://members.embarcadero.com also work, from exactly the same code base, to exactly the same database.
We have set up redirects for everything we could think of that was under our control. If you find something you think is now going to a black hole, let me know and we’ll address it.
Hopefully this information will help you figure out the problems you’re having getting to our web sites.
John Kaster
EDN Program Manager
Embarcadero Technologies, Inc.
A few comments:
dn.codegear.net was never the public Developer Network address (it was used for internal networking). The correct address was always (and still works/redirects) dn.codegear.com. The developer network now lives at edn.embarcadero.com – and all articles and URLs on the codegear.com domain redirect to the EDN web site.
You do not have to re-register your products. The registration system still resides on our servers. the main entry point, members.codegear.com redirects to members.embarcadero.com.
We had to get off the Borland.com domain as we are no longer part of the Borland corporation (legal reasons). All Codegear and Embarcadero domain links should still work and get you to the right places.
if you find any links in these domains that don’t redirect, please let us know.
Hi,
thanks for the comments. I sent an email to support at embarcadero dot com, after the Borland support had pointed me there. Still no idea why the DN credentials won’t work. But I guess we’ll figure it out in time.
The .net domain was spit out by Google, btw. That was the reason I followed it initially.
Thanks again,
// Oliver
Oliver, thanks for the dn.codegear.net explanation. That’s really strange that it would have referenced that, since codegear.net is an internal-only domain. I’ll have our SEO people look into that.
You should be able to do a password recovery request for your email address from https://members.embarcadero.com.
One other thing: members.codegear.com doesn’t redirect to members.embarcadero.com just yet, because I need to make sure any of our products that might link to members.codegear.com can gracefully handle a redirect to members.embarcadero.com before we turn that on 😉
John, that is something I did not consider once. It caused quite some trouble because software not handling it will simply get “invalid” data and some 3xx return code. It did wreck some havoc when I forgot it. 🙁
BTW: Will try to search my browser history tomorrow when back at work. I remember I was pointed to http://www.codegear.net and I think I followed some (site) search results from there, but not 100% sure at the moment.
Thanks for your help and comments,
// Oliver
Oh, I think I remember. What I followed was the link from http://www.codegear.net (which showed up in the Google results) to dn.codegear.net (link was on that page).
// Oliver
http://www.codegear.net shouldn’t have ever been public either!
It would be great if you can help us reproduce that behavior .. I’d really like to clean it up if possible. I tried to figure out how you could have been led to dn.codegear.net, but I’m still coming up dry there, too.
Please let me know if you continue to have issues with your membership account, too.
So far no response from support at embarcadero dot com.
The history showed what I pointed out in my previous two comments. The link was not directly on Google, but the page http://www.codegear.net was listed and had “Developer Network” listed as dn.codegear.net …
// Oliver
Thanks for the follow-up, Oliver. We’re still working on the reasons behind http://www.codegear.net was ever public …
Got a reply today. There appears to be another way to download RAD Studio 2009 as an ISO file (instead of archiving the ZIP files as written in the docs). Much more convenient and the method I’d have preferred initially 😉
Well, it appears that things are sorted now mostly. Thanks again for your help, John and David.
// Oliver
Oliver, thanks for letting me know your download issue is solved now. I did a Google search explicitly for http://www.codegear.net, and all it did was recommend http://www.codegear.com. I also searched our own search engine, and go no hits for “www.codegear.net” so I guess it will remain a mystery.
Sorry you ran into this problem, but I’m very glad everything has been resolved now 🙂