Looking for license protection ​recommendat​ions

Hi

I've developed a Windows Forms .NET App and would like to protect it with serial keys.

Any recommendations?

Thanks

Joakim

@joak23: Do you want a one way serial, as in it gets sent in a registration email, they paste it in, and off they go? Or do you want to bounce a hardware fingerprint off of a server? Do you need to just activate, or do you want turn on features based on a key?

The only one that I've ever used is a web service based activation scheme. We generated a random key for the user that they put into the software. The software used that to talk back to a web service and sent it a hardware fingerprint. The web service decided if they were supposed to be on a time limited trial or full version and then activated based on which features they were supposed to get. There was an offline implementation that involved license files. It's probably overkill and evil, but...meh.

That was a learning experience, but if you can get away from writing your own, it's probably better. There are some third party solutions that you can plug into your project. That's probably the simplest way to do it.

also i would add this:

who is the target market ?

how many copies of the app do you expect to sell in total over say 3 years ?

what will the pricing be like per copy ?

i am not asking you to tell me all of that but rather that you need to look at that and see what the cost and the benifit really are.

I have seen folks who wanted the full on copy protection when they were selling to a small number of users and honestly in some cases the users they were selling to would not be pirates of any software unless it was by accident.

if your stuff needs it go ahead and do what you need. just make sure it's worth it for your app and it's market.