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Having installed and activated Delphi XE4 using the license available to me from my employer I decided that, despite the very nasty taste left in my mouth, I would pay the $49 required for the XE4 “hot-fix” release, albeit only in order to remain with the valid update window now imposed by Embarcadero, on the off-chance that one of the next two releases might actually be worthwhile. This uncovered something of an ironic problem.

Ironic, because normally complaints about registration and activation revolve around being forced to do it at all. In this case, my problem was that I couldn’t provoke the damned thing to allow me to do it!

Having installed and activated using a previous license serial number, I needed to now update my installation with a different license serial number.

Seeing no other obvious way to achieve this, I re-ran the installer and chose the “Update” option, which mentions that this is the appropriate choice if applying a new license. This is what I was doing, even if it was for the same edition.

So I went ahead.

Despite the fact that the installation was identical, it took just as long as a fresh install. But never mind that. Once finished, I launched XE4 expecting to be presented with the registration/activation wizard to register and activate the new serial number.

But no. XE4 started normally and informed me that indeed it was already registered.

My first panicked thought was that my personal license serial number had been automatically applied to my employers EDN account, used to previously register the initial license used. Thankfully this was not the case. For once in the EDN licensing system – a system which as far as I can tell hasn’t been updated in at least a decade – getting anything changed is as good as impossible. They can’t – or won’t – even remove or delete registered products that you no longer use. They can’t or won’t even provide a filter to allow you to choose which product you wish to see when you view your list of registered products. But I digress.

As I say, I checked my employers and my personal EDN accounts, and with relief found that the new, personal license serial number wasn’t listed in either. But that simply raised the question of what exactly had the installer done with it if it wasn’t here ?

Clearly it must have used some information in that license serial number to determine what parts of the product to install.

So next, I tried deleting the .slip file from the License folder in the RAD Studio\11.0 installation, with no difference. Still registered.

Next I completely uninstalled XE4, making sure to tick the option to “completely remove” all files and registry entries. That would do the trick, surely ?

Once that finished grinding it’s way through my system, I then of course had to re-run the installation, using my new serial number. Which I did, and upon starting XE4, up came the registration and activation wizard as expe… oh wait. No, it didn’t.

This completely new installation, after having “completely removed” the previous installation, was also “Registered”.

So I went spelunking in the Program Files folder for the installation, and sure enough managed to find bdsreg.exe – a likely looking candidate for the registration wizard. Unfortunately, it refused to run without some unspecified and (as far as I can tell) undocumented parameters on it’s command line.

So I did a little more digging and found LicenseManager.exe !! “AHA!” I thought, “finally, something I can use to manage my license!”. Sadly my optimism was premature.

Upon running the sadly mis-named “License Manager” I could indeed see all the licenses I had installed, with their serial numbers and details. Unfortunately, “License Viewer” would have been a better name for this tool because despite their being a menu item to “Delete” license entries, it remained resolutely disabled. Viewing is all this Manager seems good for.

But at least I could see that, indeed, my XE4 installation was still licensed using the old license serial number. Not my own one. Not the one used to actually install the product on this most recent occasion. And no, there were not two licenses present for XE4. Just the one.

After a bit more digging around on the internets, I found a reference to the location of some other .slip files, in ProgramData\Embarcadero (I can only think that the one in the License folder of the installation itself is just there for decoration?)

With reference to the dates on these files I was able to identify one which looked most likely to be that for XE4. So I deleted that and tried launching XE4 again.

Hazaa! Finally, I was presented with the registration and activation wizard, already filled out with the correct, new license serial number, and was able to finally register the product and active my license serial number against my EDN account.

Oh well, at least what should have taken 30 seconds or a couple of minutes, at most, only took the best part of TWO HOURS! (Now that I know about those additional .slip files, it will be much quicker next time of course, as it will be for you, dear reader 🙂 ).

I can only say that recent comments from people complaining that “you get what you pay for” as a way of dismissing “OSS” (conflated with “free”) software as being unable to compete with the capability and polish of commercial software developed “properly” don’t fit too well with the experience we Delphi users seem to be expected to put up with.

15 thoughts on “Changing Your Delphi License Serial Number”

  1. >Having installed and activated Delphi XE4 using the license available to
    >me from my employer I decided that, despite the very nasty taste left in
    >my mouth, I would pay the $49 required for the XE4 “hot-fix” release,
    >albeit only in order to remain with the valid update window now imposed
    >by Embarcadero, on the off-chance that one of the next two releases
    >might actually be worthwhile.

    Jolyon, you’ve fallen off the wagon immediately! 🙁 What happened to the resolve to “cross-grade” just yesterday? It seems that even you might not be immune to the “Stockholm Syndrome” that infects so many of the (few) remaining Delphi users. 🙁 Be strong! Get your fiancee to format your hard drive if necessary to help you make a clean break. 🙂

    It should have been abundantly clear by now that Embarcadero bungles everything it tries to do. *Every* aspect of dealing with the Delphi product is screwed up; heck, when Tony de la Lama posted the new online demo download web page for XE4 on release day, someone clicked the “Buy Now” option and it spat out 17 lines of code and an error message. Buying, installing, documentation, editing, compiling, debugging, DataSnap, FireMonkey, DBExpress, Interbase, the language itself… it’s all in need of a major overhaul that the powers-that-be are never going to let happen. The poor quality is leading to poor sales (no press release this year bragging about sales being up like the last two years), which leads to cutbacks/outsourcing/layoffs, which will result in an even worse product… they’re at the threshold of a “death spiral”. You don’t want to be abandoning ship when there’s fish swimming past you.

    >I can only say that recent comments from people complaining that “you
    >get what you pay for” as a way of dismissing “OSS” (conflated with “free”)
    >software as being unable to compete with the capability and polish of
    >commercial software developed “properly” don’t fit too well with the
    >experience we Delphi users seem to be expected to put up with.

    I find myself recommending mostly open source to startups that have had me help select software stacks for them, not out of ideological reasons but just on the basis of being best-in-class. Personally, I’m using 100% open source right now myself, including desktop OS. The EULAs I deal with are human-readable and the only requirements upon me are basically to share the code of improvements I make and distribute, not restricting how I use the product otherwise like EMBT’s. My IDE doesn’t need any registration and only takes five seconds to go from launch to being fully usable. 🙂 That the products are developed, supported and guided by the actual community that uses them rather than a handful of “suits” doesn’t hurt, either. It leads to better products and supportive communities without all of the hostility and angst that currently exists in the Delphi community.

    I wouldn’t trade open source products like PostgreSQL, SQLite, LibreOffice, R, R Studio, RapidMiner, Python, Eric IDE, SQLAlchemy, Pandas, BIRT, NumPy, SAGE and OpenSUSE for their commercial counterparts if the pricing were reversed. Open source has given me a more powerful data analysis setup (and 98% completely cross-platform!) than I had when working at the HQ of a billion dollar company a few years ago.

    2. I switched to Lazarus and its great, starts up in a few
      Seconds and coding is almost exactly the same as
      Delphi

  2. You mention the “update window now imposed by Embarcadero” – Could you please elaborate (just because you are not paranoid doesnt mean they arnt out to get you)

    1. Upgrades to the past view versions are only available to holders of licenses to the immediately prior 3 versions iirc. 1 further version usually remains eligible for a few months. As of now, If you are a Delphi 2009 or earlier user and you want XE4, then you have to buy a new user license.

  3. How about migrating to Lazarus instead? Free and very capable. To top it all, probably the best desktop development tool for Linux.

  5. If you are going to use Lazarus, get CodeTyphon. Easily the best way to install Lazarus & get a bunch of hard to trackdown components in the process.

  7. IMO Lazarus is good, but for me who is used to Delphi IDE I can’t live without native debugger. Lazarus+GDB is slow under Windows, I don’t know how good it’s in Linux. EXE in Delphi starts in a second, in Lazarus it’s about 3-4 sec.
    Also docking system isn’t 100% stable.
    FPC is not 100% compatible with existing Delphi source (those System.Generics.* stuff won’t compile, though there is fcl-stl).
    No full unicode support for RTL.
    Generics are not 100% compatible with Delphi.

    Cross compiling isn’t that easy for novice (in Delphi it’s 2 clicks).

    On the other hand many things very good:
    IDE is stable (90% of the time)
    Start of IDE is 1 sec.
    No .Net dependencies.
    Refactoring won’t crash whole IDE after Nth rename.
    Advanced syntax supported, like bitrecords, bitarrays, binary and octal numbers.

  8. Didn’t have any problem with updating to XE4 myself, purchased the special upgrade, got the new Serial number, downloaded the XE4 packed installer which then downloaded everything else and I was greated with the registration wizard at the initial startup where I finally registered the serial code. All this with XE3 installed prior the XE4 installation. Btw, anyone else bothered by that pixel damaged Delphi icon during the installer in the top right corner? It’s ugly as hell and it’s been like that since this Delphi installer was created 😀

    1. There’s never been any problem with different versions of Delphi installed. At one point I had a “museum” VM with EVERY version of Delphi from 1.0 to 2009. 🙂

      Problems with the licensing system on the other hand have only gotten worse over the years since the introduction of activation. This particular one probably existed before but this was the first time it bit me.

  9. I am using Lazarus v3.10 on Ubuntu 12.04, (Code Typhon distribution), works great. I left Delphi at version 6, so cannot comment on the starting speed. One of the item that bothered me in earlier versions of Lazarus versions F12 toggling problem, now it is fixed. The docking of the windows worked great too, IMHO, much better than D6. I am not familiar with the facilities of the latest Delphi, guess some of us may require to stay Delphi because of the new features, or it may be a corporate decision?

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