So our IT guy has been going back and forth with Compuware for a few weeks now. I bought BoundsChecker so that I could find obscure memory corruption in our product. It's pretty good at that. What completely sucks though is their support, their licensing, and their sales people.

Most recently, because it takes such a long time to run our product under BoundsChecker (not surprising given the relative complexity), I had my boss buy a hefty multiprocessor server specifically for the task. But since it's a server it puts out alot of heat and noise, so it's probably not the best idea to put it by my desk, but rather to rack mount it in the computer room. So far, so good. Get everything installed, only to find out that DevPartner specifically rigged up their licensing to prevent running the product over Terminal Server sessions. Now I'm not trying to have multiple users on the system - I just need to get remote access to the server because of the physical distance.

Well, let's just say Compuware sucks. They are insisting that I purchase a concurrent user license at three times the cost (over four thousand dollars), just for the luxury of not having to sit at the physical console. Even when I explained the situation that I intended to still only have a single user making use of the product, they basically told me to forget it.

Caveat emptor.

It's extremely tempting to just open the damn thing under SoftIce, trap on the call to GetSystemMetrics(SM_REMOTESESSION) and remove the check. Yes, I can see the irony in using SoftIce (a product of Numega, now part of Compuware) to remove the brain damaged license check in their own product.

Oh yeah, it looks like they canned all the developers working on DevPartner. I wouldn't expect to see much new innovation there...

Compuware Numega Lab Is No More
http://codeverity.com/blogs/timweaver/archive/2007/06/11/compuware-numega-lab-is-no-more.aspx