Trial Reset 4.0 Final Fixed Zip

[Ray Kowalewski]

Can you direct me on how to get my free license reset?
I thought I was running the free version but apparently it was an Enterprise trial which expired. I'd like to activate the free version again so I don't lose the data I've collected.

I don't know why my free licence is expired, I suddenly have the following message :
Error in 'litsearch' command: Your Splunk license expired or you have exceeded your license limit too many times. Renew your Splunk license by visiting www.splunk.com/store or calling 866.GET.SPLUNK.

You can tell if your are on an Enterprise(Trial) Vs Free licence by opening Splunk.
If you are prompted to Login, you are on the Enterprise (Trial)
However if you get access without providing any credentials, then you are running the Free version.

However, when I went back to the free license the violations are still there preventing the search function from working. The only solution I've seen is to get a license reset from Splunk support directly.
Thx,

License? Expired? I thought the community edition was "free forever" therefore sporting the "community" tag. What's going on? I tried signing in with my outlook.com account but it says "something went wrong" and comes back to the same screen.

To bypass "30days left must go online to sign-in", sign-in once to Microsoft account, you'll get %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VSCommon\OnlineLicensing folder that you can copy to offline PCs.

Registry key of interest: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Licenses\5C505A59-E312-4B89-9508-E162F8150517\08878. I assume the 08878 subkey may differ from installation to installation (why not, isn't?). I have tested only on my own one. So check other subkeys if you can not match proper values described below. Binary value stored in that key is encrypted with CryptProtectData. So decrypt it first with CryptUnprotectData. Bytes of interest (little-endian):

Increasing these values (preferable the year :) ) WILL extend your trial period and get rid of a blocking screen! I know nothing of such a tool that allows to edit encrypted registry values, so my small program in C++ and Windows API looks like:

C. "We could not download a license. Please ensure your accounts are authenticated." If this message is encountered, sign out and sign back in. You can either sign out by clicking on the Sign out link and then signing back in by clicking on the account icon in the upper right corner of Visual Studio. Or you can just click the link Reenter your credentials. This link is a good indication that your account is not synced up with Microsoft servers and the error message is right in that your account is not authenticated and the license cannot be refreshed.

Once you have signed back in and your account is successfully authenticated, you will see that the "Reenter your credentials" link is gone. This is a good indicator that you can now go ahead and refresh the license. If it does not do that automatically you can click the Check for an updated license link once again. This time you will see a short confirmation message and your associated email address will be listed.

Signing in is inevitable if you want to get rid of this annoying warning. But even if you have always been signed from day one, you may still run into this warning. Based on my experience, this may happen if you have recently changed the password for your account, or you have added 2FA (two step verification) to your account, or you have reset the recovery code for the account and with it the app passwords. It may also have to do with inactivity or the recent changes Microsoft has been making to the "sign in experience" for Microsoft accounts.

I had this problem. Signing in or pressing the "Check for an updated license" link did not work for me. My solution was to restart Visual Studio, try again (sign in and check for license). Restart Visual Studio, try again. I had to do this several times and then it worked! (I also tried pressing the "File" menu that is available for a short period of time before the annoying request window appears again.) Maybe you just don't get connected to the server or the server itself doesn't update its database fast enough.

I'm using Visual Studio Professional licensed over the MAPS Action Pack subscription. Since the new version of the Microsoft Partner Center one have to add the subscribed user to the partner benefit software.

The first approach is easily circumvented, the first time you run the app save the date/time to a file, database, or shared preferences and every time you run the app after that check to see if the trial period has ended. This is easy to circumvent because uninstalling and reinstalling will allow the user to have another trial period.

The second approach is harder to circumvent, but still circumventable. Use a hard coded time bomb. Basically with this approach you will be hard code an end date for the trial, and all users that download and use the app will stop being able to use the app at the same time. I have used this approach because it is easy to implement and for the most part I just didn't feel like going through the trouble of the third technique. Users can circumvent this by manually changing the date on their phone, but most users won't go through the trouble to do such a thing.

The third technique is the only way that I have heard about to truly be able to accomplish what you want to do. You will have to set up a server, and then whenever your application is started your app sends the phones unique identifier to the server. If the server does not have an entry for that phone id then it makes a new one and notes the time. If the server does have an entry for the phone id then it does a simple check to see if the trial period has expired. It then communicates the results of the trial expiration check back to your application. This approach should not be circumventable, but does require setting up a webserver and such.

It is always good practice to do these checks in the onCreate. If the expiration has ended popup an AlertDialog with a market link to the full version of the app. Only include an "OK" button, and once the user clicks on "OK" make a call to "finish()" to end the activity.

In case you want to go with the most simplistic approach(which will fail if the app is uninstalled/reinstalled or user changes device's date manually), this is how it could be:

This question and the answer of snctln inspired me to work on a solution based on method 3 as my bachelor thesis. I know the current status is not for productive usage but I would love to hear what you think about it! Would you use such a system? Would you like to see it as a cloud service (not having trouble with configuring a server)? Concerned about security issues or stability reasons?

For Android library it is based on the Google Play licensing verification library. I modified it to connect to the node.js server and additionally the library tries to recognize if a user changed the system date. It also caches a retrieved trial-license in AES encrypted Shared Preferences. You can configure the valid time of the cache with the configurator. If a user "clear data" the library will force a server-side check.

Server is using https and also digital signing the license-check response. It has also an API for CRUD trial apps and users (publisher and developer). Similiar to Licensing Verfication Library developers can test their behaviour implementation in the trial app with test result. So you in the configurator you can explicit set your license response to "licensed", "not licensed" or "server error".

If you update your app with an ass-kicking new feature you might want that everyone can try it again. In the configurator you can renew the trial license for users with expired licenses by setting a versioncode that should trigger this. For example user is running your app on versioncode 3 und you want him to try features of versioncode 4. If he updates the app or reinstall it he is able to use full trial period again because the server knows on which version he has tried it last time.

Shared preferences, databaseCan be cleared in the android settings, lost after an app reinstall. Can be backed up with android's backup mechanism and will be restored after a reinstall. Backup may not always be available, though should be on most devices

External storage (writing to a file)Not affected by a clear from the settings or a reinstall if we don't write to the application's private directory. But: requires you to ask the user for their permission at runtime in newer android versions, so this is probably only feasible if you need that permission anyways. Can also be backed up.

Sign in to some accountDoesn't matter if it's their Google account via Firebase or one in your own server: the trial is bound to the account. Making a new account will reset the trial.

Firebase anonymous sign inYou can sign in a user anonymously and store data for them in Firebase. But apparently a reinstall of the app and maybe other undocumented events may give the user a new anonymous ID, resetting their trial time. (Google themselves don't provide much documentation on this)

Which (combination of) methods work for you depends on your app and on how much effort you think the average John will put into gaining another trial period. I would recommend steering clear of using only anonymous Firebase and Advertising ID due to their instability. A multi-factor approach seems like it will yield the best results. Which factors are available to you depends on you app and its permissions.

For my own app I found shared preferences + firstInstallTime + backup of the preferences to be the least intrusive but also effective enough method. You have to make sure you only request a backup after checking and storing the trial start time in the shared preferences. Values in the shared Prefs must have precedence over the firstInstallTime. Then user has to reinstall the app, run it once and then clear the app's data to reset the trial, which is quite a lot of work. On devices without a backup transport the user can reset the trial by simply reinstalling, though.

c80f0f1006