Chapter 22. Licensing Your Application
Proper .NET content licensing can mean the difference between marketplace dominance and financial bankruptcy. And Iâm just talking about trying to understand the license agreement that comes with Visual Studio. You still have to figure out a licensing method for your own application before you send it to your customers.
Licensing and license agreements are an essential means of protecting the intellectual property youâve worked so hard to develop. How does licensing work? The key is found in the roots of the word itself: license comes from âli-â (to tell a lie) and â-censeâ (from âcentsâ as in âpenniesâ). Together, these roots mean âto tell lies about small units of currency.â The confusion brought about in trying to figure out what this means keeps the bad guys perplexed and occupied long enough so that they donât steal your application.
If this method doesnât work, there are software solutions, some of which Iâll review in this chapter. Part of the discussion focuses on designing a licensing system that will appear in the Library Project. The .NET Framework does include classes for component licensing but they are primarily used for designers of controls used by other programmers within the Visual Studio IDE, and not for end-user applications. We will not be covering these licensing features in this chapter. If youâre curious about such features, start by reading about the License Compiler (lc.exe) in the Visual ...
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