WinLicense > FAQ > General > Can you give me a simple guide about how to create Trial periods for my application and how to register my application with WinLicense?

At first glance, WinLicense might look a bit complex to use but as son as you familiarize a bit with it you can see that it’s very intuitive. Here we explain the very basic way to create trial/registration schemes for your application protected with WinLicense.

1) Go to the Software panel and create a new Software (selecting your input/unprotected file, output/protected file, etc)

2) From the main WinLicense panel (“Application Information”) select your “Software” and click on “Save” Project, so you can later re-use the same Project to protect your application again and/or modify the protection options.

3) Press the “Protect” button and your application will be protected. If you now run your application, it will run exactly in the same way as your unprotected application.

Now you can start adding Trial/Registration features to your application:

1) Open you saved Project and go to the Trial Settings panel and check the option “This application will run in trial/restricted mode”

2) Go to the Trial Restrictions for your application, for example you can check the “Executions” restriction and set 10 executions restriction.

3) Go to the Registration panel and check the option “This application can be registered, with a presence of a valid key”.

4) Protect your application and run it.

You can see that each time that you launch your protected application, it will appear a “shareware” message (MSG_ID_TRIAL_NAG) from the Customized Dialogs panel. Of course, you can edit that message or set the message to not being displayed.

After launching your application 10 times (according to the previous “10 executions” restriction) your application will refuse to run (displaying the message MSG_ID_TRIAL_EXECUTIONS_EXPIRED from the Customized Dialogs panel)

You can create a license key for your protected application from the License Manager in WinLicense GUI, or creating your own license generator using the WinLicense SDK as explained here.

If you selected the “File Key” type of license (from the previous Registration panel) you just need to put the license file key in the same folder as your protected application. After that you can launch it and it will run in Registered Mode.

From here, you have the basis to create trial/registration schemes for your application protected with WinLicense. You can use different Trial/Registration options and features and also use the WinLicense SDK, so you can “talk” with WinLicense from your source code.