Creating an installer with an activation key

[Coxylaad]

Hi,
I am stuck on this one - it must be easy enough to do as I would have thought there would be loads of people wanting to do this.

I have a program which i want to package up, I also want to protect it from being installed on multiple machines by the use of an activation key.
ie.
as part of the installer a random number is generated, they then have to phone me up with it and I pass the number through an algorithm to give them back the activation key.

It seems easy to me in principal but I dont know where to start on it.

Any help would be gratefully recieved and stars are also available

Ian

 

[shatch]

Maybe it would be better to build the functionality into the application rather than the setup project, it would allow for much greater flexibility?

 

[Coxylaad]

well its a flash program that I am installing, and to be honest I dont know how to record the fact that the cd key has been entered.

i would prefer to have a cd key on installation and be done with it.

 

[shatch]

Well if you are not installing a vb.net app you wont be able to put it in there, and i am not sure it can be done using the setup and deployment projects from within VS.net so you would have to write a vb.net app which did the installation.

The most important thing to consider is that you will need to encrypt the flash movie on the CD, otheriwse people will just copy it straight from the CD to the hard drive so it will need to be encrypted before being put on the CD.

As for the installation, the installation package should generate a random number and put it into the registry, which it can then use from then onwards. they are then prompted to give you a call and you will come up with the key pair for the random number. (shouldnt be to hard to code this part)

Once done, the flash file can be decrypted onto their hard drive in a specified location.

One thing to note is that flash cannot check anything, so once unencrypted it will be distributable with no problems. Also note that if you wite the install app in vb.net the client will need the .net runtimes installed on their computer

I hope that this helps you, if you need any more advice, please just ask

 

[Coxylaad]

Thanks for the reply

I can get all the files wrapped up in the msi in the install which is nice, and I accept once its on the machine then it can be copied, I just wanted some basic protection to stop everyone just installing the the cd on multiple machines.