Thanks. I will check both those out too then.

Russ Brown (Using C#2010/SQL Server 2008)

Hi Russell,



QLM is pretty easy to use and enough for most projects, unfortunately for my project I needed more control and by the time I needed to start implementing this, Protection Plus and Solo Server which I already have been using for years came up with a native .Net support library and a lot more flexibilities than QLM, of course keep in mind that Protection Plus is a more mature product and more expensive than QLM.

Edhy Rijo

Edhy, did you end up using Quick License Manager after you tested it?



Just curious how easy it was to use and if it did what you wanted....

Russ Brown (Using C#2010/SQL Server 2008)

Sean,



Thanks for another recommendation.



For those who might check out this post at a later date, here are the vendors mentioned so far:



Quick License Manager - License Manager



DeepSea Obfuscator 2009 - Obfuscator



SmartAssembly - Obfuscator/Optimizer



Xenocode - Was Obfuscator, now App Virtualizer as Spoon Studio. Here is an article about this: Xenocode Morphs into Spoon



CliSecure .NET Obfuscator - Obfuscator

I'm using CliSecure .NET Obfuscator to protect a silverlight application.

It accepts and xap as input, obfuscated it and outputs an obfuscated xap file. I'm happy with the results so far.

Good deal.  Thanks for researching this for everyone.

They are inexpensive as well, which is a good thing!

Russ Brown (Using C#2010/SQL Server 2008)

Hi guys,



It looks like Quick License Manger is going to be a winner here. I have been testing some implementation o a plain .Net project and so far so good.



Their product includes a web service you can install on your host computer or your ISP for online activation and many other goodies.



The control of the activation process is also pretty good and flexible for the developer/customer service. Still I need to do more in deep testing, but so far they have everything I need in a License Manager tool.

Edhy Rijo

By the way, Redgate just acquired Smart Assembly on September 1st.

http://www.red-gate.com/

Russ Brown (Using C#2010/SQL Server 2008)

I've used Xenocode (http://www.xenocode.com/) to obfuscate my code. It worked OK. A couple of things about obfuscation and SF. As long as you have pretty granular control over what gets obfuscated, any of them will work. However, there are a lot of gotchas when obfuscating SF code. The primary concept to remember is that SF serializes a bunch of stuff as strings to designer. Things like the name of BOs, the names of methods, the names of enums, etc.



Because of this you need to make sure you don't obfuscate BOs (the class names at least) and don't obfuscate any methods used as fill methods with listviews or listboxes or combos. Also, don't obfuscate enums names or values.



Thus, it is very doable, but there is some pain and make sure you test the obfuscated version. BTW, I was doing this with ClickOnce...that was fun!

Humm, looks pretty good. Thanks Russell.

Edhy Rijo