First and foremost, this is not a question about generating a serial number for other products. I am not looking to “hack” other products.
Here are my requirements:
- I would like to generate a standard looking serial number: AILU7-ABCDE-54321-1234-AFCK-17UDF
- I need some process that validates whether or not that serial number is “valid” – This portion does not have to be extremely complex. ie, if all the numbers sum up to a value greater than X – I’d be okay with that, but if there are solutions out there that handle this complexity for me, I’d be happy to use them.
- The process that validates the serial number can not be server side. ie, I can not make a request out to an external web server to verify that the serial number is valid.
- I need some way to pull out metadata from the serial number. ie, after I have validated that the serial number is correct, i need to be able to read out some values from it: “user limit”, “expiration date”, etc …
- The verification of the serial number will be done via a ASP.NET MVC 3 application. The generation of the serial number does not have to be done that way though.
I’m not looking for a silver bullet that will accomplish all these requirements, but more or less some links to documentation or existing libraries that will help me get started. The only library that I have seen is the XHEO DeployLX library; which is just entirely too much for my needs.
Could you please provide me with any information that could point me in the right direction?
Did you check out Brandon Staggs article on this very matter?
In Delphi, but theory holds whatever language.