Cryptolens Licensing for .NET (new package)

You might have noticed that we have changed from being called Serial Key Manager to Cryptolens. As a result, the design language, domains and naming of our products has changed. Now, we are also updating the .NET packages that are used to interact with the Web API. We will describe the changes below (you can also see the release notes)

New package

The new package, Cryptolens.Licensing, is essentially the same as SKGLExtension, with several improvements described below. You can either install it using NuGet or download pre-compiled binaries for the desired framework. Read more here.

.NET Standard

The new library introduces support for .NET Standard 2.0, which means more platforms in the .NET family can use it (eg. .NET Core 2.0). You can see all the supported platforms here. There is still support for .NET Framework 4.0, although most of the new features will be in the .NET Framework 4.6.

License verification on the server

Previously, most of the license validation logic was performed on the client, eg. you had to check expiration, features in the client code. The new Cryptolens client now supports the ability to create rules and perform these checks on the server. The rules are set up using feature definitions on the product page. You only need to set Metadata=True, which will give you access to the license key status. A code example is shown below (this will automatically check that the key has not expired and that it’s not blocked).

var result = Key.Activate(activateToken, new ActivateModel() 
{
    Key = "license",
    ProductId = 3349, 
    Sign = true, 
    Metadata=true
});

if(result.Metadata.LicenseStatus.IsValid)
{
    Console.WriteLine("License is valid!")
}

A good practise is to verify the signature of this license status object, which can be done with VerifySignature. At the moment, this requires .NET Framework 4.6 or .NET Standard 2.0 to work.