User-specific error - license related?

kevboy80

I recently wrote some .NET code that uses the Red Gate API to compare databases on two different servers (QA and Prod) and synchs data from QA to Prod if there are differences found.

The code works great in testing and I was able to run it without a problem on live data, but other users are having problems running it. The .exe resides on the QA SQL server and it's being run from the command prompt on that server, and the problem seems to occur when any login other than mine is used to connect to the server. The error boils down to the fact that this line works fine when I run it, but returns Nothing when others run it:

Private p_sourceDb As New RedGate.SQLCompare.Engine.Database

I should point out that I'm not getting any kind of errors when building or running the code along the lines of assemblies not being found.

Is there something I need to do to ensure that any user on the server will be able to run this code? Is this even related to the license at all?

Brian Donahue

The problem that you describe indeed seems to be a licence issue. I'd guess that you had licensed the Red Gate tools on the computer and the application is somehow picking up on some licence information saved in your user profile. If the application had been properly licensed it would work for everybody because it's not going to check for any Toolkit licenses on the machine if one is found embedded in your executable.

The kicker is that if the licensing is never invoked, you won't get any errors at build-time, so you wouldn't know if the licensing was successful or not.

If you're building the project using Visual Studio, this other postmay be helpful.