TurboPower OnGuard for Free Pascal

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Support
• Version history

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Introduction

OnGuard is a library to create demo versions or leased versions of your applications. Create demo versions that are time-limited, feature-limited, limited to a certain number of uses, or limited to a certain # of concurrent network users.

This is a source-only release of TurboPower OnGuard ported to Free Pascal. It includes packages for use with Lazarus IDE, but Lazarus is not a requirement to use OnGuard.

Installation

To install OnGuard into your IDE, take the following steps:

1. Unzip the release files into a directory (the best it \components subdirectory of Lazarus tree).

2. Start Lazarus.

3. Open & install the package. This requires a Lazarus IDE rebuild.

NOTE: It is NOT necessary to install OnGuard into Lazarus IDE's component palette just to use OnGuard. You can simply add the OnGuard source path to your project and instantiated objects via code too. The benefit of this method is that it works with any IDE or programmer editor too.

Support

A dedicated support newsgroup has been set up for the Free Pascal port of OnGuard. Connection details are as follows:

NNTP Server: geldenhuys.co.uk Port: 119 Group: onguard.talk

Any News Client (eg: Mozilla Thunderbird, XanaNews, Opera Mail etc) can be used to connect to the news group. This is by far the best option and gives you the freedom to use your preferred news client software.

In a pinch, there is also a HTML webnews interface. This interface has some limitations (eg: attachments), but is good enough to read and reply to messages when on the go via a web browser (smartphone or desktop). To access the HTML interface, visit the following URL: [http://geldenhuys.co.uk/webnews/]

Version history

• Version history is not maintained here any more. Please review the commit log of the source code repository to find detailed version information.

• July 27, 2009 Initial addition of features:

  • InvalidCount which allow limited count of valid code even if trial period is expired (useful due to user mistakes causing incorect system date sometimes)
  • instead of logical volume serial number , hardware hdd ide disk serial number is no used if available
  • compilation with newest Lazarus SVN problems fixed

• July 28 2009

  • initial support for InvalidCount value allowing 'breaking the rules' limited , for example run program a few times if trial period expired
  • IDE serial number used for machine id instead of volume serials
  • fixed TextHeight obsolete properties in lfm resources

• October 31, 2008

  Import into lazarus-ccr SVN repository.

• June 4 , 2006

  Conversion to Free Pascal / Lazarus

  Contributor : Boguslaw Brandys Based on Kylix version by Andrew Haines

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