I am trying to create a basic licensing system where I take a unique ID from the client computer, and I get this Hexadecimal string (hyphens removed e.g. 84-18-CE-....): 8418CFEE73FA22E6AB0760C73A496497C6C347DA88A9F63B95FE1E1D6A350AA1D7D3A9EE870795AECC3C109AA8B4A78CIt's only encoded into this format to make the ID longer.Basically what I've been trying to do (without success), is to create some routine that can transform this string into a 25-character long (minus the dashes) string like the one below:H8G02-J8293-L02O9-S920Q-F8D9X(An alpha-numeric key with numbers or letters in no particular pattern, preferably letter,number, letter or vice versa)I just can't figure out how I could then validate this key, so that I could extract the untransformed Hex string we began with.Note that the original Hex string will not always be the same length. Also, a routine that will convert ANY string into such a format (alpha-numeric, caps-only) will be acceptable.I just realized that perhaps this isn't possible (to shorten the string down to 25 characters, and still retain the information (silly, I know). I will now accept anything that will allow me to create a 25-character OR LONGER string, from which I can select 25 characters.
VB.NET - Serial Key Generating (Encryption, Hashing, Encoding?) Algorithm
licensing;vb.net;strings;encryption;text encoding
Convert the hexadecimal number to base 36.  Example here.  According to that page, Your input yields 1DWCLWKQZK16WMKIIEYVLLXA9E4OQ64P80KDOH4ALCYRCYCTKRUHQRXTM6HLDEV78E6APXQV1JG in base 36.Here is a Stack Overflow question that has an arbitrary base conversion function in c# (alas, couldn't get the online converter to properly convert it to VB).  You can see it in action here: http://ideone.com/nDun6s