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Possible Duplicate:
how can i make my product as a trial version for 30 days?

I would like to implement a trial period for my application.

What would be the best way of doing this?

I thought of writing the start date of the trial period to the registry.

But my guess is that would be just to easy to overcome by for example using CCleaner.

What would be a better way of doing it?

PS

I'm not looking for a 100% watertight solution, since that just isn't possible.

EDIT

I'm not looking for an online solution.

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PeeHaa
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  • More dupes than most questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%23+trialware Voting to close. – spender Aug 28 '11 at 21:53
  • what type of application is it? – Will Aug 28 '11 at 21:54
  • @spender: I've looked at the first questions with their answers. They all talk about adding stuff to registry. As stated in my question I want to know another solution or a way to make sure an app like CCleaner doesn't remove the registry key – PeeHaa Aug 28 '11 at 21:57
  • If you wanted to offer say an 8 hour usage trial, you could make use of a timer in your application that fires say every minute. Then you just need to increment and save this value every time the app runs. This removes any dependance upon the System DateTime. – dodgy_coder Aug 29 '11 at 07:29

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I would try to store as little as possible on the client pc and use a web service distributed solution.

Still hackable of course but at least there is nothing to find or edit on the client and you have control from your server on who starts the application.

Of course this assumes the client pc should be online for the application to work.

surely improvable but as you say there is no perfect solution.

Davide Piras
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