i'm quite comfortable with vb
Thank you all for replying, each one was quite useful.
I looked at the demo of flash studio and it seems very useful, and easy to use.
However northcode brought up an issue that i had never even thought about, and that was of being able to see the actionscript through ASViewer. That would actually be quite unsafe for me, and so I guess tools such as swf studio, flashnpack and flash studio would all be unsafe in that all the actionscript code (including my encryption algorithm used to scramble the registry key's) would be visible to anyone with ASviewer. Am I correct in assuming this?? Or do swf studio and flash studio, encrypt their outputs so that ASViewer can NOT decompile the swf? I know that swf studio and flash studio provide projector files (.exe), but couldn't someone extract the swf from the .exe, and then open the swf in ASViewer???
Also thanks northcode for the vb/flash examples. I was already considering this idea, however the only reason it wasn't attractive to me was because that would mean the swf would have to be provided separtely. Where as swf studio and the others compiled an exe which meant the swf was contained in it, hence i wasn't providing the swf separtely. Is there a way in VB to actually embed the flash file (not simply reference the external swf file),and then compiled VB exe would simply be self contained?
My other option if that is not possible is to do this (northcode's examples got me to think of all these possiblities, so i thank you..). What i was thinking is the following, have a shockwave control in my VB program. And in my flash program have a boolean variable (isRegistered). And when the VB program starts, it first reads the registry, checks the keycode to make sure it's registered, then opens loads the swf into the VB project (like you did in the examples). And then VB sets the variable of isRegistered (in the flash file) to true or false.
--> This would mean that the encrytion algorithm, and registry access would all be contained in the VB exe, and means that if the someone were to open the swf in ASViewer, they wouldn't see the encryption algorithm or the registry accessing that's going on.
--> the only problem I see with that is, what is someone opens the swf that is refernced by VB, and they see a variable called isRegistered. And they see that this is the variable that determines if the flash file can continue. It would be quite easy then for someone to create THEIR OWN VB program that simply loads the swf and sets the isRegistered variable to true.
--> this again would mean providing the swf is unsafe :(
So hopefully this outlines my concerns with all the of possiblities that have been presented.
In an ideal world what i need is a program that actually embeds the swf into the vb program, and provides a single output .exe from which the swf would not be able to be extracted, and from which ASViewer would not be able to see the actionscripting.
Again thanks for all your help, and I hope to hear some suggestions on ways to protect my software. Thanks.