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Recursion issues Messages   Related Types This message was discovered on microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb. Responses highlighted in red are from those people who are likely to be able to contribute good, authoratitive information to this discussion. They include Microsoft employees, MVP's and others who IMHO contribute well to these kinds of discussions. Post a new message to this list... Nak Hi there, I was wondering what the normal procedure for making a license provider require licensing was? I have just created a licensing class library and I want to make it require a license to be used, but I cannot protect the license provider with itself as you just get a massive recursion issue taking place. Can I protect my own "protector"? :-\ Nick. Reply to this message...        One Handed Man \( OHM - Terry Burns \) Ahem, well, cant you just instantiate a new one ? -- OHM ( Terry Burns ) . . . One-Handed-Man . . . If U Need My Email ,Ask Me Time flies when you don't know what you're doing "Nak" <Click here to reveal e-mail address> wrote in message news:Click here to reveal e-mail address... [Original message clipped] Reply to this message...        Nak What do you mean? My class needs to be licensed or any tom dick and harry could use the class library to protect their applications. But I dont seem to be able to protect anything within it! :-\ Nick. "One Handed Man ( OHM - Terry Burns )" <news.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:Click here to reveal e-mail address... [Original message clipped] Reply to this message...        Nak I think I'll give a quick example, incase I'm missing something really obvious here, My licensing class library contains several classes for licensing applications and controls, the main ones which the developer interacts with are myLicenseProvider ^ A license provider that does the main business and myLicenseAttribute ^ A custom attribute which is used to pass addition information to the license provider upon initialization Protecting anything becomes really easy with this, you basically do exactly as you would with a LicFileLicenseProvider with the exception that you need to include another attribute for each licensed class to set some extra properties which are essential to getting a valid license. For example, <LicenseProvider(GetType(myLicenseProvider)), _ npLicenseAttribute(..parameters are passed here but are irrelivant...)> _ Public Class Class1 Private cLicLicence As npLicense Public Sub New() cLicLicence = CType(LicenseManager.Validate(GetType(Class1), Me), npLicense) End Sub Protected Overrides Sub Finalize() MyBase.Finalize() If Not (cLicLicence Is Nothing) Then cLicLicence.Dispose() cLicLicence = Nothing End If End Sub End Class This is great and suits me down to the ground, *but* I want to use this same method of licensing to protect "myLicenseProvider". Now in theory this is impossible as the license provider would need to create a new license provider to validate its license and the provider that it creates would have to do likewise, hence forth an endless loop has occured. The same goes for *any* other object used in myLicenseProvider that I have created, I cannot license them as they will recurse themselves into a big hole of muchness. The only thing that I can think of is to put code into the class constructor of myLicenseProvider to call its internal routines and validate its own license before it does anything else, but surely this is a bit of a bodge isn't it? How would this normally be tackled, I'm trying not to make things slack as I want to rely on this class library for all my future projects. Nick. "Nak" <Click here to reveal e-mail address> wrote in message news:Click here to reveal e-mail address... [Original message clipped] Reply to this message...        One Handed Man \( OHM - Terry Burns \) Perhaps, you could create a public property as an integer (0=non self >0 means self )called something like validatingSelf; this would be set to true if the reference was to Me, each function would check this and execute if this value was 0 or <2. How about that ? -- OHM ( Terry Burns ) . . . One-Handed-Man . . . If U Need My Email ,Ask Me Time flies when you don't know what you're doing "Nak" <Click here to reveal e-mail address> wrote in message news:Click here to reveal e-mail address... [Original message clipped] Reply to this message...        Nak Hi OHM, Thanks for the idea, I've managed to get something working, what I've done is I've made a selfvalidation method inside of the licenseprovider class, this is the first thing thats called when the licenseprovider is called upon, if it returns false then a null referenced license is returned. It seems to have the desired effect. I've kind of been thinking, surely I only need to license this 1 class within the class library as this is the only one that does the magic. I'm hoping anyway, that and panicing about how easy it is for .NET reflector to disasembly my code to its orignal source, which kind of destroys the good work Ive done in making a licensing application if all you need to do is decompile 1 class library and remove a couple of lines :-( Oh well, thanks for the idea :-) I hate recursion! Nick. "One Handed Man ( OHM - Terry Burns )" <news.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:Click here to reveal e-mail address... [Original message clipped] Reply to this message...        Peter Huang (VIP) Hi Nick, If you wants to protecte your code from being disassembled, you may try to use the obfuscation. VS.NET IDE 2003 shipped with one community version of Obfuscation, dotfuscator. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dotfuscator /dotf6duz.asp You may take a look and let me know if that helps you. Best regards, Peter Huang Microsoft Online Partner Support Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Reply to this message...        Nak Hi Peter, I dont have VS.NET 2003, I have VB.NET Standard 2002. I've tried a few demos of commercial products but havent been massively impressed by the results, especially considering the claims. One thing I wasnt aware of until yesterday was that you can disable strong name checking on an assembly! What is the point of using it if it can be disabled!! Half of me thinks that the reason .NET code is so insecure is so that *anyone* can read it, i.e. Microsoft! Anyway, enough of my thoughts on that subject. I shall keep looking around for an effective obfuscator, if you know of any *good* ones that require very little interaction please let me know :-) Nick. ""Peter Huang"" <Click here to reveal e-mail address> wrote in message news:Click here to reveal e-mail address... [Original message clipped] Reply to this message...        Peter Huang (VIP) Hi, Here is two links you may take a look. XenoCode is the powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use code protection and optimization solution for .NET developers. http://www.xenocode.com/en/Default.aspx Obfuscating .NET: Protecting your code from prying eyes http://www.desaware.com/products/books/net/obfuscating/index.aspx Best regards, Peter Huang Microsoft Online Partner Support Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Reply to this message...     System.ComponentModel.LicenseManager System.ComponentModel.LicenseProvider System.ComponentModel.LicFileLicenseProvider Ad MBR BootFX Best-of-breed application framework for .NET projects, developed by Matthew Baxter-Reynolds and MBR IT

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