licences.licx hell

[Claire]

We're using several sets of third party toolbox controls and each of these
append licensing information to a licences.licx file when they're dropped
onto a form.
Our solution currently has 25 different projects. Different subsets of the
third party controls are used by each project. Some of the projects are
stand alone executable modules, others are class libraries. Within each
project directory there may be subdirectories that we use to help us split
up project files logically. There's probably 20 different licences.licx
files in the solution.
I'm trying to run my application and Im receiving an exception message that
the licences.licx file couldnt be found.
I don't actually understand how this file "works". Where should they be
located ? Are they required at run time? If there's several different
versions of the file, and they're needed at runtime, and the solution
finally compiles to a single directory, then which one do i copy to the
final target directory?

thank you

 

[Thomas]

the license.licx is created per project, so each project has it's own
license file, located with the project file.
It contains the license keys for all components within that project - and
only for that project. There is no solution wide license.licx file.
The information is compiled into the EXE/DLL so it's available at runtime.
When checking license information runtime, .NET (at least 1.0, not sure
about 1.1) only looked at the included license nformation in the main EXE.
So components not used by the main EXE, e.g. in an assembly would turn up as
not licensed.
Our solution was to manually copy all license keys to the main EXE's
license.licx file, so we were sure that all keys were available. After doing
that, we never had any problems again.
Out solution was a smaller (~10 projects), and most components was used
throughout the solution, so it was wasy to handle.
If anyone know of a better and more automatic solution, I too are curious of
a good solution.