Licensing and Key Validation

[Andrew Cooper]

I'm writing a program for an process engineering company and a common
practice in process engineering is for licenses to be located on a flash
drive so that the flash drive has to be plugged into the computer that is
running the software for the software to work. I'm not exactly sure how to
implement this in my program. Are there any articles, tutorials or source
code examples of this out there somewhere. I've searched but confess to not
knowing exactly what to call this in terms of keywords. I've found a few
software licensing code snippets out there but nothing like what I'm looking
for.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Andrew

 

[Pavel Minaev]

I'm writing a program for an process engineering company and a common
practice in process engineering is for licenses to be located on a flash
drive so that the flash drive has to be plugged into the computer that is
running the software for the software to work.  I'm not exactly sure how to
implement this in my program.  Are there any articles, tutorials or source
code examples of this out there somewhere.  I've searched but confess to not
knowing exactly what to call this in terms of keywords.  I've found a few
software licensing code snippets out there but nothing like what I'm looking
for.

It all depends on how "strong" you want the protection to be. Reading
a file from a flash drive obviously isn't hard (you can use DriveInfo
to enumerate drives in the system). What to do with it once you've
read it is another question entirely.

On the whole, if your IP is really so valuable that it's worth
protecting, it's usually more economic to purchase a good existing
protection solution, complete with code obfuscation etc. Google should
help you there.

 

[Arjan de Haan]

I'm writing a program for an process engineering company and a common
practice in process engineering is for licenses to be located on a flash
drive so that the flash drive has to be plugged into the computer that is
running the software for the software to work. I'm not exactly sure how to
implement this in my program. Are there any articles, tutorials or source
code examples of this out there somewhere. I've searched but confess to not
knowing exactly what to call this in terms of keywords. I've found a few
software licensing code snippets out there but nothing like what I'm looking
for.

Perhaps what you're looking for are called dongles. There are various
suppliers which offer dongles to protect software from being run on
multiple computers (copying isn't a problem, but you need a dongle to
run the application). Google for 'software protection dongle'. You will
find several vendors there.

Good luck.
....Arjan...