RE: Merlin

Last I looked, there was a high cost to entry with Merlin, both in terms of dollars and specific technical expertise. Given that a lot of developers are still refusing to give up SEU, I honestly don't see a lot of shops making that investment.

We have RDi licenses here, but just last week a developer trying to upgrade to 9.8 had a devil of a time with applying the permanent license. RDi kept returning extremely vague error messages and it wasn't until I discovered that the user's install somehow managed to have a floating license instead of the permanent license, even though our instructions for users to install RDi 9.8 are crystal clear and the user in this case is not one for PEBKAC errors. After several days before we finally determined the issue and had to get IBM to tell us how to delete the floating license, he was ready to jump ship to VS Code for i.

I've got both RDi and VS Code for i installed on my work laptop. I primarily use RDi due to my several years of experience with it, but I am learning to use VS Code for i on my personal laptop for when I work on PUB400. Does anyone who has used both have a good reason to recommend RDi over VS Code for i?

- Dan Bale

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Rob Berendt
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2025 12:38 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Merlin

According to the Fortra Survey at
under application development tools Merlin is used by 2% of IBM i shops.
While RDi and Visual Studio Code are neck and neck at 54% and 53%.

So, does one attend the IBM i Guided Tour on Merlin on Wednesday or not?
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