Serial Key for my WSO C#

The easiest way? Probably something like this...

1) Put all your serial keys in a flat file (ie plain text file, or XML, or CSV, etc). Then upload the flat file to your server. There are ways that you could encrypt this file to make it secure, but you want "easy", so I'll leave that part out.

2) When your app starts up, customer enters serial key.

3) Use the WebClient.DownloadString class (assuming you're using .NET) to grab the flat file on your server that holds the serial keys.

4) Separate the serial keys into an array.

5) Iterate through the array and see if it contains the serial key that your customer entered.

Again, this isn't a secure way to go about this, but it is "easy".

A much better way to do this would be to put your serial keys in an encrypted database... but you're talking a lot more complexity for something like that.

Also, what's to keep someone from sharing their exe file and serial key with someone else? To prevent that, you would have to set it up so that each serial key would only work on a single computer... and there are ways to do that, but none of them are particularly "easy" (or foolproof, for that matter).

Hi Brandon,

This is exactly the route I took ... Yes it is very unsecure, might look into something more solid.

Thanks for all your info!