Usage of radcontrols dll.

[Antony]

My company has a licensed version of radcontrols which is used in our web application. Now there is a plan to outsource the entire project to an off-shore team and I am a bit concerned about this since the entire project with all the DLLs will be given. So how can I prevent our DLLs from being copied and used in any sort of unauthorized means?

[Shinu]

Hi Antony,

It is possible to protect your Telerik ASP.NET AJAX assembly from unauthorized use. Since you own a licensed version, you have the full source code of the Telerik.Web.UI assembly and protecting RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax requires the Telerik.Web.UI assembliy to be built from source code (due to modifications applied to the source files). The source code of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX is distributed separately and is bundled with build instructions.

Suppose you have extracted the source distribution ZIP file in X:\RadControlsSource.

• Open X:\RadControlsSource\Telerik.Web.UI\Common\AssemblyProtection.cs in a text editor.
• Uncomment the "ValidatePassPhrase()" method call inside the Validate().
• Change the value of the ApplicationName constant to match the "name of your application".

      private const string ApplicationName="Your Application Name";

• Now save the AssemblyProtection.cs and rebuild RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax (described separately in the source code build instructions document).
• In your application replace the existing reference to Telerik.Web.UI.dll with the one built from source code.
• Add the following code in the Page_Load method of your page codebehind class. 

      Application["Telerik.Web.UI.Key"]="Your Application Name";

If the same dll is used in any other application, then an error message will be generated, "This version of RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax is licensed only for use by 'Your Application Name' ".

Another option is, you can replace the licensed version with a trial version of the same release which can be easily downloaded from Telerik site. Since the trial version contains all the features, it will not affect the development process.

Hope this helps,
Shinu.

[Antony]

Thanks shinu for your valuable reply. I don't think the first option is much secure as the key is exposed in the code. So I would prefer your second option.