InstallSite Blog

Creating Product Keys using Cryptography

If you want to protect your application using a product key or serial number in the common scheme of ABCDE-FGHIJ-KLMNO-PQRST but don't want to use any of the commercially available solutions, you may find these two articles at codeproject.com useful:

• Product Keys Based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 
• Product Keys Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Both articles are written by Jeffrey Walton.

2007-03-15 Edit: corrected the link to the AES artilce - thanks to Christoph Voigt

Two Articles about Web Setup Projects with Visual Studio

User "rmortega77" recently has published two articles about web setup projects on CodeProject :

Deploy IIS settings along with your Web Project

One of the issues that you need to consider as you plan for how to deploy your ASP.NET applications is how to deploy IIS settings along with your solution. This is a brief example of how to set the Virtual Directory Authentication Settings.
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/SetIISettings.asp

Allow user to set physical directory path during Web Project deployment

We want the user to set the physical path for our Web application IIS virtual directory, during deployment. Since the Web Setup project does not allow this, our idea is to use the Application Setup project to create the physical path, and content, and later with a Custom Action, create the virtual directory, using IIS Admin Objects.
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/WebToInstall.asp

Universal Extractor

Universal Extractor is an open source tool that extracts files from various types of archives, including self-extracting EXEs, MSI packages, CAB files (including the special InstallShield format), Wise and Nullsoft Installation packages.

http://legroom.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=Open_Source&file=index&page=software&app=uniextract

Macrovision is cleaning up product lines

Macrovision has announced changes for their InstallShield, InstallAnywhere, AdminStudio and DemoShield product lines.

While these end-of-life announcements usually include several dates, like end of service pack support, the most important date for users is the end opf upgrade pricing. Or, in the case of InstallShield MultiPlatform and DemoShield, the end of sales.

InstallShield Professional 7
Upgrade eligibility ends December 31, 2006. Older versions of InstallShield Professional are already unsupported.

InstallShield Developer 8
Upgrade eligibility ends December 31, 2006. Older versions of InstallShield Professional are already unsupported.

AdminStudio 1.x-5.x
Upgrade eligibility ends April 30, 2007.

InstallAnywhere 1.x-5.x
Upgrade eligibility ends December 31, 2006.

InstallShield MultiPlatform
This product line has been given up in favor of InstallAnywhere (on August 29, 2006). There are migration paths, depending on your version and maintenance status. Please contact your reseller for advice.

DemoShield
This product line, which hasn’t seen any major upgrades during the past two years, will be withdrawn from sales effective December 31, 2006. If you can recommend a replacement product, please drop me a note.

My recommendations for users of these old versions:

• If you want to upgrade to the latest version, don’t wait too long. For some products there are end-of-year offers available, and Macrovision announced a price increase for 2007.
• If you don’t want to upgrade, download and save all save all add-ons, hotfixes, and service packs for your version, as these ususally get pulled from the web site for unsupported versions. It may also be useful to save or print relevant knowledge base articles.