What is licensing?
Licensing is a mechanism used to protect intellectual property by ensuring that users are authorized to use software products.
Licensing is not only used to prevent the illegal distribution of software products. Many software vendors, including MESCIUS, use licensing to allow potential users to test products before they decide to purchase them. MESCIUS, inc. publishes the ComponentOne product line.
Without licensing, this type of distribution would not be practical for the vendor or convenient for the user. Vendors would either have to distribute evaluation software with limited functionality or shift the burden of managing software licenses to customers, who could easily forget that the software being used is an evaluation version and has not been purchased.
How does licensing work?
When you decide to purchase a ComponentOne Edition, you will receive a serial key. The serial key must be activated on your development machine to properly license any application built with ComponentOne controls. Serial keys are activated using the License Manager (gclm.exe), installed with any ComponentOne edition.
When a project containing a ComponentOne control is built, licensing information stored in the system is obtained, and a unique runtime license (.gclicx) is generated. Only one .gclicx file is generated per application build. This file must be distributed with the application as an embedded resource.
For .NET Framework applications, ComponentOne controls use .NET licensing. Visual Studio obtains version and licensing information from a newly created component, like the toolbox, and will generate a licenses.licx file and add it to the project. The licenses.licx file contains the licensed component's strong name and version information. The MESCIUS Visual Studio plugin (found under Tools) can be used to update this file and help resolve licensing issues. For a Web Forms application, the runtime license may also be stored as an embedded resource in the App_Licenses.dll assembly, which must always be deployed with the application.
Later, when the component is created at runtime, it obtains the runtime license from the appropriate assembly resource that was created at design time. It can decide whether to simply accept the runtime license, to throw an exception and fail altogether, or to display information that reminds the user that the software is unlicensed.
All ComponentOne editions are designed to display licensing information if the product is not licensed. Applications will not run correctly if the license is missing or invalid after the 30-day trial has expired.
For more information on how to activate a key or license an application, check out our Licensing Documentation.