I was recently asked to review a licensing solution – CryptoLicensing for .NET(disclosure – I was paid for my time , the time it took to review it, but had only committed to doing a fair and balanced review). After reading Oren’s post a while ago about how he couldn’t find a decent licensing solution to the point of making his own, I was sure that this one will fall out as well over some technicality.
Typemock also has a home-grown solution for licensing, and while searching the web about a year ago I was hard pressed to find a decent licensing component for .NET that didn’t suck in terms of usability or features.
So, all the signs pointed to the possibility that this would be yet another one of those licensing schemes that are just not good enough, but I was wrong.
It took me less than an hour to feel pretty comfortable with the CryptoLicensing API, and the feature set it contains is pretty powerful, packaged in a very simple API. It does have some small flaws, but they are shadowed by the very big value it provides.
As one discovers pretty quickly when doing their own homegrown licensing solution, a licensing scheme has at least two main parts: THE API you use from within your software, and the Serial Generator (KeyGen) software. Often, the keygen will also have an API that can be used programmatically so that you can then generate licenses on the fly automatically per an automated request (say CRM).
I was happy to discover that CryptoLicensing supports all that out of the box and so much more. but let’s start at the beginning:
The API:
The API is very simple to use. There is only one class you use in your project: CryptoLicense. This class allows you to load a license from the local machine, or save one either to the registry or to the file system. the API can be used in two ways:
the simple way is just to check a status property on the CryptoLicense class one you have tried to “load” it. If it’s anything but Status.Valid then you need to put in a serial number.
The class can then be invoked to show a “Enter Serial” dialog that is built in, which will tell the user what are the current license terms or how much time they have left on the current license. The dialog is fully customizable – it comes with full source code so you can make it your own very simply.