How to remove the “Trial Edition” banner from the VisiFire open source chart kit

Visifire is a very good graphing component for making silverlight or WPF applications.  The component was first released as an open source library on GoogleCode, but since then has been made a closed source proprietary and for profit project.  The newer version contains several enhancements, but the open source version is still quite useful.  The greatest advantage is that while chart rendering can be impossibly slow with the Silverlight/WPF toolkit, it is very fast with visifire.

Unfortunately, it is hard to find the original open source version, it is available at: https://code.google.com/p/visifire/ .  Even after downloading the open source version, one still sees a rather annoying “Visifire Trial Edition” banner in the upper right corner (shown below), which looks unprofessional.

image

Removing this in the source code is complicated because this “Trial Edition Tag” is generated in an obfuscated fashion (presumably to prevent people from doing just that).  The text and hyperlink are encoded as byte arrays, which are unpacked in a somewhat convoluted way.  They can be found in the Visifire Control class.

private static Byte[] wmRegVal = new Byte[] { 0x56, 0x69, 0x73, 0x69, 0x66, 0x69, 0x72, 0x65, 0x20, 0x54, 0x72, 0x69, 0x61, 0x6C, 0x20, 0x45, 0x64, 0x69, 0x74, 0x69, 0x6F, 0x6E };

private Byte[] wmLinkVal = new Byte[] { 0x68, 0x74, 0x74, 0x70, 0x3A, 0x2F, 0x2F, 0x77, 0x77, 0x77, 0x2E, 0x56, 0x69, 0x73, 0x69, 0x66, 0x69, 0x72, 0x65, 0x2E, 0x63, 0x6F, 0x6D, 0x2F, 0x6C, 0x69, 0x63, 0x65, 0x6E, 0x73, 0x65, 0x2E, 0x70, 0x68, 0x70 };

After downloading the open source version, simply search for these arrays, comment them out, and then comment out the one line that uses them them when directed to by the compiler error.  Rebuild, and voila!  No more banner in your open source software.

7 thoughts on “How to remove the “Trial Edition” banner from the VisiFire open source chart kit

  1. danieldunn10

    Hi Thanks for this it is just what I have been looking for.

    I have downloaded the source code, removed the lines from VisifireControl.cs

    How do I use these files, do I need to compile them to a dll file?

    If so could you explain that a little more, or point me in the right direction.

    Thanks very much

  2. danieldunn10

    Thanks for your help, I’m sorry I’ve developed web apps but I’m new to creating a dll from the .cs files.
    When I open the solution from the google code download, it has solution items and all of the .cs files are listed.
    What are the steps I need to take to compile those files into a .dll?
    I think I need to reference the dll I make in my application, instead of the WPFVisifire.Charts.dll I currently use.
    But it is just that step of making the dll file in visual studio from the .cs files which I cannot work out. I have spent many hours on it yesterday and today.
    Thanks for any help.

  3. sonakshi

    Hello,
    I am facing the same problem and it still remains the same. Actuallly i downloaded visifire_v3.6.8 from here http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Components-Libraries/Visifire.shtml
    and i have got only the .dll files in it. following are the files :
    -Samples
    -WP7 Binaries
    -silverlight binaries
    -WPF binaries
    It do not contain any visifire.cs file in it. can you please help me. I really need to delete this”Trial visifire Edition” thing from it as soon as possible, as i have to implement visifire Dashboard in a project and i am really loving visifire dashboard a lot so please try to solve this problem of mine please….

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