Sunday, November 14, 2010

Licenses.Licx error with DevExpress in Visual Studio 2010

While refactoring a business solution at work to deploy using Visual Build rather than InstalShield, I ran into an issue with our DevExpress web components not seeing the correct licenses in the licenses.licx file.  After googling for a bit and discovering how the licenses.licx files are created and manged in VS2010, I started troubleshooting to see if I could resolve my issue - seeing the red text on every web page telling me that I'm using a 'trial' edition of the software when I clearly wasn't.
 
I deleted the file to get VS to recreate it.  That didn't seem to work for me.  I renamed it.  I checked permissions on it.  I investigated how it got deployed and whether I needed it on the server or not (if I remember correctly, you don't have to explicitly move it to the server).  In the end, my solution sort of knocked my socks off.  I deleted all of the content in the file and left it blank.  I then built my msi and deployed.  Imagine my surprise when the blank licenses.licx file got rid of my trial license message!  I don't know if this is a bug with VS2010 or it's integration with DevExpress 8.2.2, but my fix seemed like a total hack.  However we've tested this in multiple environments and it's solid.

5 comments:

Nightwolf said...

Wow, i've spent hours searching the net for solutions to this problem. None of them worked. Except yours, which for me doesn't make any sense but as long as it works... Thanks

Guss said...

Amazing, it worked for me aswell

Ultimate Venom said...

Hi!! All night I was trying to figure out how to fix this issue, reinstalling DX, reinstalling VS2010, changing some registries, etc etc.

Only this works for me. Thanks!!

g70 said...

Great,
Your solution worked for me with DevExpress 7.2.
What a useful post !
Thanks a lot.

Anonymous said...

Worked like a charm. Greatly Appreciated.