Do software crises ever happen when you have plenty of free time to troubleshoot them?  I’m sure that they do,  it just doesn’t seem that way for me in the last few years.

Expression Blend Warning

The first sign of trouble appeared as a gentle nag screen in Expression Blend 4.  “Only 2 days left to activate your license” it whispered to me one morning.

“What the heck?” I thought to myself.  I knew that I had activated the license months ago.  Just to be sure, I looked it up.  Yes, about a week after I installed Expression Blend I had requested a license key from MSDN and activated my copy.

Re-Activate

So I found my copy of the key and reactivated the license.   This is where it’s starts to get strange.

Side Note: Some of the text is cut-off in these screen shots.  This is _another_ issue with Blend.   I’m running my computer in 115% DPI settings.  Apparently non default DPI settings still cause problems like this.  I thought the Device Independent Pixel framework in WPF took care of this.  I guess not.

Starting the activation process.

First error during the activation.

Blend offers to retry.  I try again.

Good news, or so I think.  Activation success.

Hmm. that’s not right.  I just activated the software.  Apparently the success message is wrong and I do not have a valid license yet.

Blend team members help troubleshoot

I contacted the Blend team and they put some of their licensing developers on the problem.   I ran some license checking software and sent the results to them to analyze.  And they found the problem.

Here’s the question from Chris that put me on the right track.

“Have you made any changes to your machine??  (Replaced a DVD/CD drive or network card??). “

Hmm. now that you mention it I have.  Dell replaced my motherboard a couple weeks ago.  Yesterday, I replaced my hard drive.  And yesterday is when the problem started.

Back from Chris comes this simple sentence .“The license software sees the change in hardware as an attempt to get around the software licensing.”

Bingo, now we know the problem.

Changing hardware may void your license

Expression Blend is not the first product from Microsoft to use this type of licensing policy.   What’s surprising is that all my other Microsoft software on this same computer is happily working without the slightest hint of trouble.

So, what is the resolution you ask?  I need to get a new key from MSDN.  Unfortunately, my subscription only grants me three activations and apparently I’ve already used them all (VPC installs?).  Time to call Microsoft support and plead my case.