Licensing processes

I'm looking for some information about how to set up licensing for some software I've created.

Basically, I want to be able to limit the number of users. I really don't want to force users to register via the internet or have my application check some remote database every time they log in to make sure they haven't set up too many users, etc.

This is an ASP.NET web application. The users will own the servers they're placed on, so really they could open the plain-text code and find out exactly what I'm doing and possibly how to get around it.

Is there a good way to handle this without the application needing a connection to the internet and pinging some remote authentication site that I may set up?

Ok, so here's maybe one idea. I just realized that rather than putting all of my *.aspx.cs (or *.aspx.vb) files out there directly that I could put them in a DLL and reference them that way. Is that a bad idea? I realize this isn't the .NET forum, but is a DLL any less efficient with regard to performance?

When we deploy ASP.Net applications enterprise we never, ever post .cs files. Just your .aspx files, your .dlls, and the mandatory web.config and such. If you do a publish you should get a folder with only the needed stuff and no code behind source.

So from a Visual Web Developer point of view, how do I create, compile, and reference the DLL? Move all code to one DLL? App_Code folder? Can you give some more details of the actual file management please?

Thanks! Great reply!

I still haven't quite figured out how I want to handle serial numbers or registration or any of that junk, but I did find a good article here on precompilation:

http://www.odetocode.com/Articles/417.aspx

I think that's what medialint was talking about.

Thanks!