Licensing third party dll at run time

[PGilbert]

We have been comtemplating to use some third party dll to build our WPF application. During the demo (developpement) period everything is working fine. But when you look at distributing those dll at run time they usually tell you that you need to call the 'solution' with Visual Studio and the run time license will be embedded automatically in the project. With Dyalog APL we use only 'loose XAML' and therefore we have nothing to do with Visual Studio (VS). I have contacted Intersoft a month ago and never got a final answer from them. I got a quick answer from ComponentOne. Here is the original question and the answer from ComponentOne support:

Question:
Hello, we are using an interpreted language (APL from Dyalog) that gives us access to your dll without Visual Studio (we use Blend however). Everything seems to work fine during development, my question is for the licensing for the run time application, we distribute a run time interpreter with a 'workspace' that is our program and your dll. We use only 'loose XAML'. Looks like we need to call your dll in Visual Studio to do the runtime licensing but we don't have any 'solutions' to call. Do you think that for interpreted language there is a way to license your dll for runtime ? We are considering Studio for WPF at the present time.

And the answer was:
Please know that every IDE has its own licensing mechanism.
Currently we haven't tested the scenario on the IDE and the environment you are referring to. Basically you need to check with the IDE and find a way to add license information in the app.
If there exist a method or function that let you embed the license information in your app using the IDE in question( similar to LC.exe for VS and Licenses.add for VB 6.0), our controls would work fine.

What Dyalog makes of all this ? Can you think of a way to embed the license information or there is something else we could do ?

Regards,

Pierre Gilbert

[JohnD|Dyalog]

Hello Pierre,

This is an interesting problem. It sounds like the Intersoft licensing requires the license to be embedded in a managed assembly, and it looks like you "project" doesn't have one.

The only thing I can suggest right now is that you create your own assembly (in C#) that defines a class (or classes) that derive from each of the Intersoft classes. You can then use lc.exe on that assembly, hopefully creating an acceptably licensed assembly. If you then []USE that assembly from Dyalog rather than the Intersoft ones directly you might be OK.

Best Regards,
John Daintree.

[StefanoLanzavecchia]

Pierre, did you ever get it to work? I am trying to see if I can use the TXTextControl (there seems to be a free version!) but I ran into exactly your same issue. Has anybody ever managed to use a licx/licensed component from Dyalog APL? All the documentation I found claims that the main EXE must embed the license which would seem to make it impossible to use it from a plain Dyalog APL...

[PGilbert]

Stefano: No, I gave-up for the moment on that issue. But looks to me, that something needs to be done from the part of Dyalog to address this issue.

[norbertjurkiewicz84]

I know this is an old thread, but is there any news on this? I'm at the exact same breaking point.

In the meantime i can verify that compiling a stub C# library with the embedded license.licx file worked for me. I also made a resource reference in VS to one of the licensed class libraries.

This was my class

Code: Select all

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace ActiProLicense
{
    public class MainClass
    {

    }
}

During compile I embedded the license file.

In Dyalog all I did was reference the class in ⎕USING. I didn't even need to create an instanc of the dummy class.

Norbert

[StefanoLanzavecchia]

Same here... When I posted my message a while back, I hadn't tried yet. It turned out that, despite the documentation claiming the opposite, it is possible to embed a license in a DLL (as opposed to the final EXE) and that seems to please the one third-party component I was trying to use. This is a bit awkward but it got me through the day...

[Vince|Dyalog]

Hi Norbert and Stefano,

You've both gone down the right path--there isn't another way to do this...

Regards,

Vince