Licensing Components in .NET - Part 2

I reckon the only reason LicFileLicenseProvider is part of the framework is to get the point across the licensing greenhorns. All of a sudden, brains start ticking: you can load the license from anywhere. You begin crafting nefarious schemes using public key cryptography. It's brilliantly academic. But something's wrong. It would be easier just to hack the code. Steal the intellectual property. Hey, maybe that's why Microsoft stopped at the LicFileLicenseProvider? Maybe, and here's a thought: maybe they should have.

Another crazy piece of the (even crazier) licensing puzzle: licenses.licx files and lc.exe.

lc.exe is a tool written in .NET by Microsoft, which is used transparently by msbuild when your Visual Studio projects are compiling. Looking inside the assembly's resource strings, we discover it:

Generates a .NET Licenses file and adds it to the manifest of the given assembly
Usage:
lc /target:TargetAssembly /complist:filename [/outdir:path] [/i:modules] [/v] [/nologo]

Options:
/target: Target assembly for the generated licenses file
/complist: Licensed component list file
/outdir: Output directory for the generated licenses file
/i: Specify modules to load
/v Verbose output
/nologo Suppress the display of the startup banner

The entry point into this assembly is the Main method of the System.Tools.LicenseCompiler class. Of (arguably) most importance is the /target: switch. This is the name of the assembly into which the compiled resource will be added. In Elsie.Target.exe this would be a resource named "Elsie.Target.exe.licenses", containing a binary stream representation of a serialized .NET object. More to come...

If you add a an empty text file named "licenses.licx" to your project, Visual Studio automatically sets its BuildAction:EmbeddedResource and CopyToOutput:DoNotCopy. It also calls lc.exe before calling csc.exe (yes, I'm a C#-a-holic). It makes the decision based on the .licx extension and you can have as many .licx files as you want in a single project (ok, that may not be true, but why would you want that many? Anyway, it will generate one /complist:[filename.licx] for each licx file in your project)

So what do you type in this/these text file(s)? If you really care, we'll have to make a 3rd installment.