Hot to protect my program

Steve,

Thank you for the information. I am thoroughly enjoying the experience with the Microsoft tools and support.

I spoke too soon - the Shareware Starter Kit uses Web services to handle registration and requires access to a Web server to host the Web services - which I assume you don't have.

There are other ways to "protect" your program - for example, you might create a password form as your startup form and require users to enter a password in order to run your program. This approach isn't perfect, since a user could still give both your program and the password to someone else. And of course, you would probably only want to show this form once, since it would be annoying to have to ener a password every time.

Another approach is to use a "time bomb" - essentially checking the date on startup, and if the date is, for example, 60 days since the application was first run, display a message and abort the program. You would then have a second version of the program that doesn't contain the time bomb that you would distribute to users that have registered with you (and I assume, paid you).

Again, this approach does nothing to prevent piracy - a user could still pass on copies of the authorized version.

The bottom line is that if you want to commercially distribute your application and provide a professional registration process, you may need to move beyond the Express edition. The Professional version of Visual Basic allows you to create Windows Installers which can include a Product Key like the ones you see in many Microsoft products. There may also be third-party installation tools that allow you to do this, but I'm not sure if they would work with the Express edition.

Do you see a WebService named "Sharewareservice" in Solution Explorer? Can you open it? If not, it might have been a problem with the download - try downloading and installing again.

Steve

I'm not sure what the problem is then. I'm no expert on the Starter Kit, in fact, I only just installed it, but it works on my system.

I would suggest that you start a new post specifically about your Starter Kit problem - perhaps someone out there has run into the same issue.

Steve

You can do this in the Customer Information User Interface dialog box that is displayed during installation by setting the ShowSerialNumber property to True and specifying a SerialNumberTemplate that is used to validate the serial number.

The following topic explains the SerialNumberTemplate property:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w3xwh311(en-US,VS.80).aspx

Hope this helps,
Steve Hoag