The 15 Minute Lockout
This post is a humble request to all Pro/ENGINEER developers out there to help me solve an extremely irritating problem. First let me begin by explaining my problem.
Unlike most CAD vendors, PTC does not give away their SDK (Software Development Kit) for free. So if you want to customize Pro/ENGINEER by means of plug-ins you need to purchase a license of something known as Pro/TOOLKIT, basically a C API used to develop what PTC calls auxiliary applications, or plug-ins. As a PTC partner I have a Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/TOOLKIT license on my development computer and only a Pro/ENGINEER license on a second testing computer. Now the thing is that plug-ins that I develop on my development computer will work only on a computer that has a Pro/TOOLKIT license. In order that they work on the testing computer, or for that matter, any other computer with just a Pro/ENGINEER license, I need to "unlock" the plug-in DLL. No other CAD vendor I know has such a system, but I guess PTC has a good reason for doing so. One obvious reason for locking the plug-ins is that someone without a Pro/TOOLKIT license should not be able to develop plug-ins.
My problem is that the unlocking program works in a weird way. When you start the program and supply it with a DLL file name to unlock at the command line, it just sits there for 15 mins and does nothing. After 15 full minutes, it unlocks the DLL within a fraction of a second. Yes, you read that right. But I will repeat anyways. The unlocking program sits idle for 15 (fifteen) minutes before it eventually unlocks the DLL. So if I make a change in my plug-in and want to see how it works on the testing computer, I need to wait 15 minutes between each and every change I make. Also, if I have ten plug-ins (I am developing 14 actually), I need to spend a total of two and a half hours doing nothing before I can unlock all of them and proceed to build my installers.
Obviously, developers found this extremely irritating and probably let PTC know about it. I say this because in Wildfire 3.0 or 4.0 (not sure), PTC changed the way the unlocking program worked. Now the program immediately unlocks the plug-in DLL, but ties up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes thereafter, thereby preventing another unlocking operation for the next 15 minutes. Same difference. The only advantage here is that the person testing the plug-in can do so immediately, and not have to wait 15 minutes. But he will still have to wait 15 minutes before testing the next change to the plug-in.
In my opinion, this new arrangement has the same nuisance value as the earlier one. A plug-in that I was developing was working perfectly fine on my development computer (they normally do) but was crashing on the testing computer. So while debugging I had to wait 15 minutes before I could change my code to see if the change that I made stopped the crash on the testing computer. I took three hours to find and fix the bug, something which would have been done in ten minutes had this weird 15 minute lockout not been there.
So why exactly does this 15 minute lockout exist? I have no damn clue! When PTC changed the unlocking program they also added a feature whereby you could supply multiple plug-in DLLs to unlock at once. Earlier you could unlock only one DLL at a time. So if I have a thousand plug-in DLLs, I can now have them all unlocked at one go in a few minutes. Of course, I will not be able to unlock another DLL for the next 15 minutes. But that does not really matter anymore because I could have added it to the list of thousand DLL's that I had just previously unlocked. So if the reason for the 15 minute lockout was to limit the number of DLL's that could be unlocked in an hour, a day or some time interval, the new unlocking program offers a way of bypassing that limitation. But as I found out the hard way, tying up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes after every unlocking operation poses serious problems while debugging a plug-in.
Instead of speculating I decided to ask PTC for the reason for the 15 minute lockout. When I was at their headquarters in Needham, I put the question across to a few people there. To my surprise none of them knew the reason for the 15 minute lockout. So maybe I was asking the wrong people. After I returned to India I logged a technical support call. The engineer who responded to my call was frank enough to admit that he did not know the reason either, but promised to find out and let me know. I never ever heard back from him. I have since asked a few other developers but none of them know the reason.
I have resigned to the fact that as a Pro/ENGINEER plug-in developer I have to live with the 15 minute lockout. What I cannot live with is not knowing why the lockout exists in the first place, especially since it can be such a pain while debugging. I would be extremely grateful to the person who enlightens me with the reason for the 15 minute lockout. Its killing me not to know.
I hope that there is a very good reason for the 15 minute lockout and not that some wise guy put it there decades ago and now nobody knows why it is still needed.
Unlike most CAD vendors, PTC does not give away their SDK (Software Development Kit) for free. So if you want to customize Pro/ENGINEER by means of plug-ins you need to purchase a license of something known as Pro/TOOLKIT, basically a C API used to develop what PTC calls auxiliary applications, or plug-ins. As a PTC partner I have a Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/TOOLKIT license on my development computer and only a Pro/ENGINEER license on a second testing computer. Now the thing is that plug-ins that I develop on my development computer will work only on a computer that has a Pro/TOOLKIT license. In order that they work on the testing computer, or for that matter, any other computer with just a Pro/ENGINEER license, I need to "unlock" the plug-in DLL. No other CAD vendor I know has such a system, but I guess PTC has a good reason for doing so. One obvious reason for locking the plug-ins is that someone without a Pro/TOOLKIT license should not be able to develop plug-ins.
My problem is that the unlocking program works in a weird way. When you start the program and supply it with a DLL file name to unlock at the command line, it just sits there for 15 mins and does nothing. After 15 full minutes, it unlocks the DLL within a fraction of a second. Yes, you read that right. But I will repeat anyways. The unlocking program sits idle for 15 (fifteen) minutes before it eventually unlocks the DLL. So if I make a change in my plug-in and want to see how it works on the testing computer, I need to wait 15 minutes between each and every change I make. Also, if I have ten plug-ins (I am developing 14 actually), I need to spend a total of two and a half hours doing nothing before I can unlock all of them and proceed to build my installers.
Obviously, developers found this extremely irritating and probably let PTC know about it. I say this because in Wildfire 3.0 or 4.0 (not sure), PTC changed the way the unlocking program worked. Now the program immediately unlocks the plug-in DLL, but ties up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes thereafter, thereby preventing another unlocking operation for the next 15 minutes. Same difference. The only advantage here is that the person testing the plug-in can do so immediately, and not have to wait 15 minutes. But he will still have to wait 15 minutes before testing the next change to the plug-in.
In my opinion, this new arrangement has the same nuisance value as the earlier one. A plug-in that I was developing was working perfectly fine on my development computer (they normally do) but was crashing on the testing computer. So while debugging I had to wait 15 minutes before I could change my code to see if the change that I made stopped the crash on the testing computer. I took three hours to find and fix the bug, something which would have been done in ten minutes had this weird 15 minute lockout not been there.
So why exactly does this 15 minute lockout exist? I have no damn clue! When PTC changed the unlocking program they also added a feature whereby you could supply multiple plug-in DLLs to unlock at once. Earlier you could unlock only one DLL at a time. So if I have a thousand plug-in DLLs, I can now have them all unlocked at one go in a few minutes. Of course, I will not be able to unlock another DLL for the next 15 minutes. But that does not really matter anymore because I could have added it to the list of thousand DLL's that I had just previously unlocked. So if the reason for the 15 minute lockout was to limit the number of DLL's that could be unlocked in an hour, a day or some time interval, the new unlocking program offers a way of bypassing that limitation. But as I found out the hard way, tying up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes after every unlocking operation poses serious problems while debugging a plug-in.
Instead of speculating I decided to ask PTC for the reason for the 15 minute lockout. When I was at their headquarters in Needham, I put the question across to a few people there. To my surprise none of them knew the reason for the 15 minute lockout. So maybe I was asking the wrong people. After I returned to India I logged a technical support call. The engineer who responded to my call was frank enough to admit that he did not know the reason either, but promised to find out and let me know. I never ever heard back from him. I have since asked a few other developers but none of them know the reason.
I have resigned to the fact that as a Pro/ENGINEER plug-in developer I have to live with the 15 minute lockout. What I cannot live with is not knowing why the lockout exists in the first place, especially since it can be such a pain while debugging. I would be extremely grateful to the person who enlightens me with the reason for the 15 minute lockout. Its killing me not to know.
I hope that there is a very good reason for the 15 minute lockout and not that some wise guy put it there decades ago and now nobody knows why it is still needed.
posted by Deelip Menezes at
8:05 PM
3 Comments:
If PTC let developers unlock DLLs in a fraction of a second (as it clearly can), developers would just stick in the unlock command into a post-build script for the DLL. Thus any number of developers in a development team could work on a ProE addin by just licensing one copy of Pro/TOOLKIT.
If testing purposes, if your DLL has access to the licensing server for your Pro/TOOLKIT license from the test machine, you don't need to unlock it to try out code changes. The unlocking is only required prior to shipping the DLL to end users.
IMHO, charging developers for accessing the APIs of an application is a dumb idea in the first place, but that's a different story. PTC seems to want to either squeeze a lot of money out of developers who'd like write addins or just make the barrier to entry for addin developers very high. Or both.
Disclaimer : This is pure speculation on my part, but seems logical enough.
If you're feeling brave and are sufficiently peeved by this annoyance, take a look at the assembly code for the unlock.exe (I forget the exact name - it's been a few years). The 15 min wait is done by calling Sleep() in a loop. Pretty easy to patch that...
By
Anonymous, At
11:57 PM, July 10, 2009
Anonymous,
Before the unlocking application unlocks a DLL it looks for an available Pro/TOOLKIT license. So I don't think other developers on a network would simply be able to call the unlocking application to unlock their DLLs, unless they had an available Pro/TOOLKIT license. So the 15 minute lockout does not appear to be for that reason.
I can understand if a CAD vendor chooses to charge developers a reasonable fee because they need to support them in their development efforts. Having said that, most CAD vendors see the benefit in third parties developing plug-ins for their products and offer their API and support free of cost. You should see how much Dassault charges developers to let them develop plug-ins for CATIA. Its ridiculous.
I am brave and sufficiently peeved by this annoyance, but not that much to warrant messing with protk_unlock.exe ;-) Not to mention that it would violate each and every agreement that I signed with PTC. I would rather PTC fix the problem themselves, or at least explain to me the reason for the 15 minute lockout.
I'd appreciate it if you could drop me a line at deelip (at) sycode (dot) com. You seem to be an interesting person, someone that would be good for me to know. We can continue this conversation offline and off the record.
By
Deelip Menezes, At
11:42 AM, July 11, 2009
The unlocking is only required prior to shipping the to end users.
By
labatterie, At
5:38 PM, December 02, 2010
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