Adding licensing capability to my app

Good day. I'm looking for a way to add licensing to my application.
By this I mean I want to be able to control how many users are able to work with the software.
It would be best if they generated a license file, for example, and sent it back to me, where I could 'activate' the file and send it back to them, thus preventing unauthorized use of the software.

What is the best way of doing this Surely there must be some MS tools that help you add this to your app

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
V.


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Adding licensing capability to my app

  • The_Nod

    One of the software suites that I deal with uses the Volume Serial Number for each machine as a unique ID value. Go to the Command Prompt and type 'vol' to find yours.

    Another option is to create GUIDs and assign them to users or machines. If you're on a network and you want to restrict access, maybe you can assign a specific GUID to each machine name. Hope this feeds you some ideas.

  • DroopyPawn

    The Volume Serial Number way is a bad idea because if I format my drive, for example to re-install Windows, then it gets a new Volume Serial. Then, the application that is locked to it will fail to work.

    I think the Windows Serial key would be a better idea, as that's more likely to remain constant through re-installations of Windows.


  • Tdar

    OK seems no one was able to help me with this. Anyhow, I wrote my own thing, looks like it's gonna work just fine. This brings up another question however, one I find incredibly frustrating.
    Aight, what I have now basically comes down to stuff been encrypted and decrypted etc, preserving the integrity of my licencing file.

    The problem I have though, is I need something which is unique to each machine. Something like a CPU ID, or a hard drive device ID, or something along those line. It needs to be a stable value, obviously. For the life of me I can't find anything usefull.

    Any suggestions

  • Adding licensing capability to my app