Providing an empty license string throws an exception about nservicebus HOT 3 OPEN

The call to License and LicensePath are explicit configuration call. It is expected that data is present. If a license is corrupt or expired we still start but without data we consider this a configuration error.

Since the longstanding principle of NSB has been to not prevent running of an endpoint if a license is not provided,

If no (valid) license is found by our license scanning heuristics or the passed license is invalid we still start. The difference is in the word "provided" vs "present". Invoking License and LicensePath is explicitly selecting that license data to use.

You're asking that if there is no data we should ignore those calls.

If there is not data the user should not invoke those methods:

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(licenseText))
{
	endpointConfiguration.License(licenseText);
}

or

if (!File.Exist(licensePath))
{
	endpointConfiguration.LicensePath(licensePath);
}

or

if (!File.Exist(licensePath))
{
	var licenseText = File.ReadAllText(licensePath);
	if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(licenseText))
	{
		endpointConfiguration.LicensePath(licensePath);
	}
}

The difference is more in an explicit configuration using License and LicensePath versus implicit license loading.

@dbelcham Do you have more information as currently it seems that just ignoring an explicit decision by the user if not the right approach.

from nservicebus.

We use the call to License(string) because we are pulling the license value from a centralized configuration system (Azure App Config and Key Vault in our case). We have many different environments in our development work (DEV/UAT/PROD/etc) and each of those environments has it's own centralized configuration stores. As we progress through our environments towards production, the restrictions around who has access to the configuration stores becomes more and more restricted. Because the lower environments are widely accessible we do not want to put our production license into them where it can be taken/leaked much more easily due to the less restricted nature of that environment.

As such, we rely on NSB's licensing which allows us to run in any non-production environment without a full license. Our expectation is that we can have the exact same code in each of our environments (i.e. no conditional saying "use License(string) only if this is production") and that the endpoints should successfully start in any of those environments, whether the license is in the configuration store or not. Our expectation is that when an empty or null license is pulled from the configuration store the endpoint will behave as if it has not been provided a license.

It seems like a very leaky abstraction that we need to add a conditional check for what our license value is when we retrieve it and then we have to decide how NSB should behave when the license is not available. This isn't our application's concern. This is an NSB concern that should be fully encapsulated with in the apis that NSB provides.

from nservicebus.

We triaged this issue and concluded that this is not a bug.
We classify this as a small improvement and it will be considered in a future maintenance release.

from nservicebus.