My Aspose.Total.lic is located in my bin folder and it does not expired until 7/28/2007 and when I upgrade from 3.7.1 to 4.0.0 it does not find the license.
// Apply Aspose.Word License
Aspose.Words.License wrdlicense = new Aspose.Words.License();
wrdlicense.SetLicense("Aspose.Total.lic");
The license handling code has not changed in 4.0.
Maybe the fact that we supply two dlls: one built for .NET 1.1 and the other for .NET 2.0 is relevant because we ship them in bin\net1.1 and bin\net2.0 folders.
For more info see https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/system-requirements/
If you placed you license in C:\Program Files\Aspose\Aspose.Words\bin then there is no Aspose.Words.dll in that folder anymore and therefore it will not find the license.
By the way, if this is the case, it is probably not a good place for your license anyway. It is not good because this folder is only on a developer’s machine when you installed Aspose.Words.msi, it will not exist on the client’s machine when the project is deployed.
You should keep your license together with your project. I mean inside the same bolder bin\Debug or bin\Release of the application you are building. Better yet, add the license to your project as an embedded resource, this way you will not have to worry about the license file location at all.
I am using VS 2003 (net1.1). I copied the Aspose.Words.dll and Aspose.Words.xml into my own Web Application and the Aspose.Total.lic is in the bin folder.
When running version 3.7.1 Aspose.Words run fine and is able to locate the license file, but when I copy 4.0.0 dll into my bin folder and run my application it cannot load the license file.
Please check that your application is in fact referencing Aspose.Words 4.0 located in your application bin folder and not other Aspose.Words.dll located in different folder.
Yes, you really are not expected to copy Aspose.Words.dll manually.
All you need to do is to add a referende to Aspose.Words to your project in VS.NET IDE. This copies it for you.
When you upgrade, you are expected to delete the old reference to Aspose.Words and add a new one because the old reference references 3.7.1 in your case. Aspose.Words is strongly named, that is your application requires a specific version of Aspose.Words.
You need to readd the reference and rebuild your application when upgrading to new version of Aspose.Words.