A Licensing/Activation Code Library by XHEO INC

Licensing in the .NET Framework
Most commercial software companies employ some degree of copy protection in their products. Protecting an entire application is relatively simple, however protecting a component to be shared among many systems can be quite a challenge. The .NET framework builds on the logic (but not implementation) of the COM+ licensing schema to provide developers with a framework for licensing their components.

What Does XHEO|Licensing Add?

Copy Protection
The licensing framework built into the .NET Framework is quite flexible allowing developers to create almost any licensing scheme they desire. However the built in support does not do much to actually protect your software. XHEO|Licensing builds on the built-in infrastructure and actually provides support for copy protection and licensing.

Security
The key to copy protection is preventing others from altering licenses or creating their own licenses. XHEO|Licensing uses RSA® encryption to digitally sign XML files. RSA encryption is based on public-key encryption which uses a public a private key pair to encrypt data so that the private key can be kept safe while the public key can be used to validate the encrypted data. By separating the key from the data an end user cannot alter a license, or create their own.

Limits & Restrictions
Often copy protection is not enough to protect your intellectual property. Especially in shared hosting and server based environments developers often want to restrict the use of their software to certain conditions. For example limiting the total number of concurrent users, or limiting which domain names a server control can be used on. XHEO|Licensing includes over 15 built in limits including a Trial limit, Product Activation limit, License Server limit and more.

Trial Versions
Easiliy add trial versions to your products. Since the available features and functionality is controlled by an external license file, you can unlock a trial version simply by providing a new license file. The easiest way to unlock a trial version is by using the Buy Now Interface.

License Servers
XHEO|Licensing includes two types of license servers. The basic License Server simply extends the local validation of a license to a remote server for additional validation. In this way you can develop a central licensing service for all your software. The other server is an Activation Server to provide product activation similar to that found in Windows XP and Office XP.

Flexibility
One of the design goals for XHEO|Licensing was flexibility. XHEO|Licensing includes a wealth of standard functionality that will suffice for most licensing needs, however since the license file format is based on XML developers can extend the limits and data contained in a license.