AppSentinel consists of 3 components:
AppSentinel, AppSentinelAdmin and AppSentinel Control Panel.

The AppSentinel DLL is referenced by and distributed with your application to add evaluation or application rental1 functionality to your application. AppSentinel handles all aspects of insuring your application is within its evaluation or subscription period and verifies that it is properly registered on a specific machine.

AppSentinel generates a hardware signature based Machine ID that is unique to the PC your application is running on. It also produces an Evaluation ID that uniquely identifies the copy of your application installed on that machine.

AppSentinelAdmin:

The AppSentinelAdmin DLL is for you to use to generate the Registration IDs required to register and unlock your software. Unlocking your application converts it to the full featured, non-expiring version or, in the case of application rental, extends its rental period by another predetermined interval.

To register a copy of your application the user must furnish you both the Evaluation and Machine IDs. You input these IDs to AppSentinelAdmin which creates the machine and application specific Registration ID that you return to the user.

When the user enters the Registration ID into your application's registration screen, it is validated via a call to AppSentinel. Once validated, their copy of your application will be registered and will no longer expire or, in the case of application rental, will have its subscription period extended.

Because AppSentinelAdmin's purpose is to create Registration IDs it is not to be distributed with your application. It is intended to be securely run by you on a computer within your company.

The AppSentinel Control Panel, described below, lets you invoke AppSentinelAdmin to create Registration IDs. You can also write your own interface program if you wish. VB.NET, C# and VB6 sample programs are provided to use as a guide.

Alternately, AppSentinelAdmin can reside on your web server and be invoked through your browser via an Active Server Page (ASP) or ASP.NET application. The documentation includes both an ASP and ASP.NET sample.

AppSentinel Control Panel:

The AppSentinel Control Panel is a user interface program that invokes the functionality of the AppSentinelAdmin DLL and lets you generate Registration IDs or re-create Evaluation IDs.

AppSentinel Control Panel

1 Application rental functionality is not available in AppSentinel Lite.