Securing WinForms Application suggestions

Posted by Sarah Fordington on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Sarah Fordington
Published on 2009-12-13T12:21:30Z Indexed on 2010/05/05 5:58 UTC
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Filed under:

c#

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licensing

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key

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protection

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software-protection

I've been looking for a simple key/license system for our users. Its partly to stop piracy (avoid users from sharing the application around) and the other half to track the number of 'licensed users' we have. I have already read a few good suggestions on SO but I'm curious as to how people have implemented the 30 day evaluation criteria.

Do you generate a key that stores the date somewhere and do a comparison each time or is it a little more complicated - deleting the file/removing the registry shouldn't deactivate.

Are there any example implementations out there that can give me a head start? The irony is that our PM doesn't want to license a third-party system to do it for us.

This is for a Windows Forms application.

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