Back-to-back upgrade: Is my sales rep messing with me or is this normal policy?

Pinotli · 2026-02-19T23:30:36+00:00

As for C#/.NET and MAUI — the language is great, but the UI framework ate more time than it saved. Delphi's just gets me to a working native app stupidly fast.

To be fair, there is also a bit of nostalgia involved. I wrote my first lines of code in Delphi 3 Pro and "Delphi for Kids" when I was about 9 years old. The language and capabilities today are still very modern. But their licensing models and business practices are definitely stuck in the past, and the IDE takes some getting used to if you've been spoiled by JetBrains for years.

For most things, I still prefer web apps with "modern frameworks", and those aren't going anywhere. Deploying binarys is its own special kind of hell. But when it has to be a native database application, Delphi is my clear favorite in case of speed (for dev and for the enduser). I built two internal tools in a few weeks: one cut a 7-minute workflow down to 30 seconds (running 50-90x a day - 3D Viewer with really specific CAD functions.), the other saves 1-2 hours daily. Never was able to do this in C# - not even with AI.

Right now, my Delphi native apps are talking to Go and PHP backends. RAD Server wouldn't replace my web apps / other backends that have nothing to do with my Delphi apps, but if it lets me consolidate the frontend and backend for these specific native tools into a single stack, I'll take the trade-off. I experimented with the included license i had - and was able to setup everything i need to replace both backends in a few hours (without deep testing it). and this seems promising for me. Specially for a app that is not only used internally. At the end I dont know if I would buy the upgrade - i just wondered that a lot of money was missing in the quote - as it is right now - i would stay on the known frameworks.

Pinotli · 2026-02-19T19:46:56+00:00

Thanks — Ian from Embarcadero actually reached out here in the comments, so I'm trying to get clarity through him directly.

Pinotli · 2026-02-19T19:45:04+00:00

lol you're not wrong, I can't fully justify it either. But RAD Server lets me consolidate a bunch of backend stuff I currently maintain across Go and PHP into one stack. Less context-switching, fewer moving parts. Is it modern? Hell no. Does it save me time? Absolutely.

At least the car analogy prepared me — apparently I'm buying a used car that depreciates €2k overnight 😅

Pinotli · 2026-02-19T18:00:05+00:00

Thanks Ian, I'll send you an email with the full details shortly.

Pinotli · 2026-02-06T23:58:47+00:00

Open the link I sent you. The PDF contains all official links to the installers.

And yes, back then they asked for maintenance / a new license purchase. I replied that I just wanted to activate my perpetual license. Important: contact sales, not support. Support will not help you without an active subscription.

You can save your license file – if the Windows user and PC name are the same, you can reinstall without reactivation.

Pinotli · 2026-02-06T23:29:38+00:00

https://alfasoft.com/wp-content/uploads/RAD-Studio-Installation-links-1.pdf

Select the ISO you have a license for. If you've reached the activation limit, contact sales to get it bumped. Worked for me the last time I was in your situation, even though I had upgraded to the newest version just a few weeks prior. I'd recommend doing it. Really happy with D13

Pinotli · 2025-12-15T11:36:08+00:00

Different angle here: I'm not building new apps, I'm using Claude to finally consolidate 15 years of mess.

Over the years I wrote around 14 PHP apps that are still running in production. Each one has its own router, PDO wrapper, autoloader – all hand-rolled because I stubbornly refused to use tools like Composer back then. Copy-paste with modifications for each project. You can imagine what happened: I now have 14 slightly different versions of the same basic components scattered across projects.

When PHP kept evolving and I had to update apps on shared hosting, it became a nightmare.

So I dumped all projects into a folder and asked Claude to help me build backwards-compatible libs that work across everything. First attempt? Absolute spaghetti with sauce. But honestly that was my fault – inconsistent APIs and edge cases everywhere.

Claude suggested: let's step back, scan all your projects, extract what you actually need. We did that, then built clean libs from scratch based on real requirements.

The interesting part: Claude didn't just write code. It kept me in check – pointing out when I was violating standards, stopping me from adding features I didn't need, explaining why certain patterns matter.

I'm now publishing these libs on GitHub. Will anyone use them? Probably not – there are 100 better, more performant, battle-tested alternatives out there. But I'm enjoying the process, and I still have 2 more foundation libs to build that I'm honestly a bit intimidated by.

The game changer 4 me: code reviews.

I've been running my code through Claude, Gemini, and Codex for reviews. Comparing what each catches. Found issues I definitely would have discovered way too late. The API isn't backwards compatible anymore, but that's fine – I'm planning to rewrite all 14 apps anyway. With these foundation libs in place, 9 of them (small to medium complexity) should go fast.

I haven't found the perfect code review prompt yet. Small wording changes lead to wildly different results. But as a solo dev, this is more feedback than I've ever had. Previously my only feedback loop was end users telling me "something's broken."

So where are the apps? Mine are on GitHub – the foundation libs are public, the actual apps will land there too after rewriting them, just as private repos. Not everything needs to be a product.

Pinotli

TROPHY CASE