Chapter 21. Licensing Your Application

Proper .NET content licensing can mean the difference between marketplace dominance and financial bankruptcy. And I'm 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 you've worked so hard to develop. How does licensing work? The key is found in the roots of the word itself: "license" comes from "li-" (to tell a lie) and "-cense" (from "cents" as in "pennies"). Together, these roots mean "to tell lies about small units of currency." The confusion brought about in trying to figure out what this means keeps the bad guys confused and occupied long enough so that they don't steal your application.

If this method doesn't work, there are software solutions, some of which we examine in this chapter. Part of the discussion focuses on designing a licensing system that we will add to 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 you're curious about such features, start by reading about the License Compiler (lc.exe) in the Visual Studio online help.