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.