Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Unleashed

Implementing Custom Licensing

The flexibility of the .NET Framework licensing support enables you to build in any kind of licensing that you want, so long as your code supports the notion of being able to return a Boolean that indicates whether or not a control is licensed.

The licensing system actually works in two different modes: at design time when you are working in the Visual Studio .NET IDE, and at runtime when the application is active. The .NET Framework designers were aware of the fact that the need for validating licenses is different at design time than it is at runtime and built consideration for that into the code. For example, you might have an ASP.NET control that validates licenses at runtime via a web service call. You don't ...