Prevent code reuse

  • Thread starter Thread starter patrick t music-images dt nl
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patrick t music-images dt nl

Hi,

I'm evaluating Visual Studio and the .NET concept for his company, which
is currently using Borland C++ Builder.

Now I tried to create components/controls etc. in .NET and I can reuse
it very easily by adding the control to the toolbox. This is great and
more 'safe' to do than in Borland.

But... although I'm nice, I'm not so nice that I am willing to give away
hours/days of coding by letting others reuse components I wrote for my
application.

So, is there a way to prevent that, or would I need to write my own
solution?

Patrick Vollebregt.
 
Patrick,

Two isues,

With Net programs you normally create one DLL not a lot. And than comes
direct the next problem what is almost full written in this newgroup, it is
intermidiate code which is more easy to decompile than Win32 code.

For that are obfuscators.
When you search only this newsgroup on that you find endless discussions.

By the way before you create all your own controls and components, there
are a lot of them which people share for free on the internet and in this
newsgroups, even very nice ones.

I hope this helps?

Cor
 
As told to us by a member of the CLR team at Microsoft, If your code
runs on the customers computer where he has administrative privileges,
there is no way to prevent them from using it. Licensing is really your
only protection.

This was disconcerting to us also.
Leon Lambert
 
Hi Cor,

thanks for your reply.

I'm not afraid of decompiled code, but I'm afraid for reuse.

Let's say I made a nice control which does things different (better?)
and is rather new. It would be great for me if I could sell my product
before someone else takes my dll and puts my components in his toolbox.

So, what I want is to disable the possibility to reuse my dll in Visual
Studio .NET. Even if I put my compontent in my .exe it would be possible
to load it's compontents in a Visual Studio .NET toolbox.

That feature I want to disable so there is a minimal barrier that might
prevent people to reuse my components.

If that is't possible I have to make a check in the constructor of every
control that validates if the calling program is signed by my private
key, which will throw an exception if it failes, or something like that.

People now have to dissassemble that dll to remove the protection, and
that can be called cracking.

If there would be no protection they would be simply be `reusing.' How
else would they know they were not allowed to use my dll in their own
application?

Patrick.
 
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