The application I want to distribute is like a 1-year subscription. After a year, the application is still fully functionnal but software-updates (via the net) are no longer available. I'm wondering if any of you got something similar to work, because I'm a bit confused in how I can avoid the user to download the update after his 1 year subscription.
I was thinking about keeping the date, in the registry, of when the user installed the application on his computer, but then all the user would have to do is install it again after 10 months to get another year. I could do it that way: if a date is already in the registry, it doesn't overwrite it so the user can't cheat, but what if, for example, the user format his hard disk or simply starts using it on another computer?
My update is available through FTP, so I thought maybe I could set a username and password for every users that I have, making the ftp innacessible to them when the 12 months are finished. But I think that's a lot of management.
Sending the update via email could have been an idea to make sure it's going to the right user, but I wanted the update to be automated from the application itself.
Maybe I could make my customers choose a personnal ID, which I would hardcode in the applicaton and would be checked against user database on the ftp... but that doesn't sound like the perfect solution.
I guess there's many ways of doing this... Which one is the best?
Thanks a lot for reading all this.
The following thread has been posted in the VB forum:
http://forums.vb-world.net/showthrea...threadid=28742
