Online Licensing

I have been reading on this forum for quite a while and I just want to say thanks for the great deal of knowledge found here.

I've been a VB developer for 6 years but now management has asked me about something that's a little out of my knowledge.

I develop a distributable app that we want to be able to use an online licensing scheme similar to Microsoft products. Install our app with the given serial number but then contact our server over the internet and validate that serial number against a database and send back to the customer whether to unlock the app or request them to phone into customer service. Follow me so far?

I can gather the info needed on the client side, encrypt the data, but I don't know how to send it or recieve it. I have been told by our network admin that I should use an ASP page to accept the data from our app and to talk to the database on the server and then send info back to our app.

Do ya'll know of any books or online tutorials to help guide me? I do work in VB6 everyday and have done work in ASP but never communicated between the two over the internet.

Any help and guidance would greatly be appreciated. Thanks in advance!!
Brandon

Well, I'd prefer to be in the .NET environment when it comes to making your own licencing scheme - and some good obfusticator-like apps to hide your precious code would also be nice.

It all mostly comes down to generating the licence keys for a specific system. There is clearly no such uncrackable scheme, but hopefully your app won't be popular enough to attract crack kiddies.

Since you seem to have that part under control, I will offer this:
Your ASP admin is probably right, that seems like your easiest and most logical solution. Doing that, you can take advantage of the VB6 inet control, or if in .NET, one of the many HTTP session controls.

Either way, you can look up code for GETing data from a server with ease at planetsourcecode.com. Remember when doing this that you don't really need to use a POST method to the server, you can send data in the bleh.com/?variable=value&key=haxors format, and have the server generate a response, just to make it a bit easier.

Good luck...and I plan to attack this forum with zest, since nobody else tends to it :D

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Originally Posted by blboyd

I have been reading on this forum for quite a while and I just want to say thanks for the great deal of knowledge found here.

I've been a VB developer for 6 years but now management has asked me about something that's a little out of my knowledge.

I develop a distributable app that we want to be able to use an online licensing scheme similar to Microsoft products. Install our app with the given serial number but then contact our server over the internet and validate that serial number against a database and send back to the customer whether to unlock the app or request them to phone into customer service. Follow me so far?

I can gather the info needed on the client side, encrypt the data, but I don't know how to send it or recieve it. I have been told by our network admin that I should use an ASP page to accept the data from our app and to talk to the database on the server and then send info back to our app.

Do ya'll know of any books or online tutorials to help guide me? I do work in VB6 everyday and have done work in ASP but never communicated between the two over the internet.

Any help and guidance would greatly be appreciated. Thanks in advance!!
Brandon

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I have recently completed reading the Visual Baisc 6 Programming Blackbook from Coriolis and it has exactly what you are looking for.

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I can gather the info needed on the client side, encrypt the data, but I don't know how to send it or recieve it. I have been told by our network admin that I should use an ASP page to accept the data from our app and to talk to the database on the server and then send info back to our app.

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Some anyone give me some explanation regarding that...i need to understand the overall concepts in order to develop something similiar to that,