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I have a windows application and i want to distribute banners to be advertised on my main form.. I don't want this to be online.. I want all banners to be on the local PC and then when the user connects to internet then I can update with latest files but I also want to make sure my application won't work if the banners are not exist and to make sure user can not change the banners?
what's your idea?
I thought of a DLL file with the banner files embedded inside that DLL but still the user can replace the DLL with another DLL and display his banners!
what do you think?
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I am not commenting on how annoyed I would be if software on my system did this, nor on how I would probably never use it. 
You could encrypt some form of identifier into the DLL and refuse to run if that is not correct. However since you are using C# and .NET programs are notoriously easy to reverse engineer, it would be ridiculously easy to crack your encryption routines.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas?
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.
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what if i use a resource DLL with banners in it? is it possible to have a code or string or whatever thing to validate the DLL?
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Possible - yes.
Worth the time and effort - no.
Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas?
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.
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It's probably not worth the trouble. Spend more time on the quality of your application rather than making it unappealing.
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well, but banners in my case is money that's why i am trying to find what's the best way...
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Lack of quality, annoyances, and bad word-of-mouth is not money.
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It's only money if people see them.
How many users have AdBlock on their browser?
How many apps do I use twice if my valuable screen real estate is taken up by unsightly adverts?
And if an app used my bandwidth just to update it's ad supply - how long before it got deleted?
Is your app going to be so useful, so unique, so undo-without-able that everyone must have it? Because if not, then all you will do is drive away potential buyers by the truckload.
The answers by the way: "Lots - because they are truly annoying", "None - because they are truly annoying" and "Measured in nano seconds".
I have learnt that you can not make someone love you, all you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
Apathy Error: Don't bother striking any key.
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If he gets his money from advertisers then he doesn't need buyers. People have put up with ads for free stuff for quite some time. The numbers of people who use adblock is not large outside of tech people. The millions of people who use Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and MSN Messenger and never bother to use something like Trillian would seem to disprove your point.
For the original poster, you might be re-assured that the largest and most successful software company in the world is going in the same direction as you are. Microsoft announces ad-supported Office Starter 2010[^].
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To get money from advertisers, he need them to buy space on his app: if his users don't exist, the advertisers will bugger off somewhere more effective.
The examples you give work because they provide a huge target audience to potential advertisers.
I have learnt that you can not make someone love you, all you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
Apathy Error: Don't bother striking any key.
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You most likely have some kind of database. When you update the banners get the checksum[^] for the banner file and store that along with the filename in the database. If, when you load a banner, it doesn't match the recorded checksum then you throw an error because of corrupted data files. You can leave the banners in their native format.
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Then I delete all the records from the database. Or add records that point to images I want to see (porn). 
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No records would cause an error. Anyone who is going to go through the trouble of hacking the datastore and calculating checksums of their own custom images is not worth worrying about. The lost revenue from those people is not significant compared to the cost of protecting against them.
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Maybe. Or maybe I'll publish an article on how to do it, perhaps include a script to make it simple for any other interested users.
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Then you are most likley violating the EULA and could be sued. And even if you did that, the number of average users who go looking for utlities of that sort is low. There will always be jerks who break stuff. For the most part it will probably not be worth their while.
Your situation is comparable to telling a store owner he can't have windows in the front of the store because anyone who wanted to could break in by throwing a rock through the window. You could even hand out rocks on the corner in front of the store. Is that risk worth having a concrete storefront? No. And even with a concrete storefront you could potentially steal a bulldozer. Risk versus reward analysis says defending against zealous jerks isn't worth it.
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T M Gray wrote: violating the EULA and could be sued
Bring 'em on!
T M Gray wrote: situation is comparable
No, it isn't, not really... more like the store keeper covered his windows with product posters and I'm giving out scrapers.
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How many people do you think will attempt to remove the banners?
And how about the support for "I deleted these huge useless files and now the program doesn't work!" ?
If you just put those banners back each time you get internet access, many people will get to see them, so why wouldn't your advertiser pay you?
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Or how would the advertiser know the user didn't?
Additionally, what about times that an ad is displayed while the user isn't watching? I'm going to go take a nap, but I'll leave CP open, many ads will be displayed while I nap... if that earns CP more revenue then I should make it my SOP.
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Hi there!
I've got a question which I haven't been able to solve.
I have a code which involves a huge load of calculations. To keep track of where I am in the calculations I do some "this.Refresh()"-es in my code and I also update some labels.
Regardless, if I click to another application and click my app again, the form is just blank again and it's not refreshed at all. Also when I don't change to another application my form stops refreshing after some calculations. For example say my app does a calculation 100 times and it keeps the user updated about the number of calculations done. I kept looking at it and after the counter (label) reached say 53 it just stopped refreshing.
When I write 'huge load of calculations' I really mean it. The last run took 13 minutes.
So do you have any suggestions? It'd be great to improve my apps.
Thanks a lot!
Han
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You need to perform the long-running code on a background thread. Then, to update the form, you need to use Invoke to avoid cross-thread problems.
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It sounds like you are keeping the main thread busy, preventing it from taking care of the GUI (except for the few times you call Refresh). This is not the right way to handle windows nor Windows.
You need to perform your calculations on some other thread, maybe a ThreadPool one, maybe a BackgroundWorker. And then you need a safe way to have that one update your GUI, and that gets explained here[^].
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]
I only read formatted code with indentation, so please use PRE tags for code snippets.
I'm not participating in frackin' Q&A, so if you want my opinion, ask away in a real forum (or on my profile page).
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Oh, man, I need coffee... 
"the more logical control.Invoke(delegate {control.Text=text;}); does not compile!"
Should there be empty parentheses after delegate?
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That probably is what I meant to say, however when given
control.Invoke(delegate() { control.Text=text; });
(as it is in my test program) VS2008 complains with
Cannot convert anonymous method to type 'System.Delegate' because it is not a delegate type
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]
I only read formatted code with indentation, so please use PRE tags for code snippets.
I'm not participating in frackin' Q&A, so if you want my opinion, ask away in a real forum (or on my profile page).
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When this came up last week, I whipped up a little app, including the method:
private void
ToggleEnable
(
object sender
,
System.EventArgs e
)
{
if ( this.InvokeRequired )
{
this.Invoke ( new System.EventHandler ( ToggleEnable ) , sender , e ) ;
}
else
{
System.Windows.Forms.Control c = sender as System.Windows.Forms.Control ;
if ( c != null )
{
c.Enabled = !c.Enabled ;
}
}
return ;
}
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which is a bit of a strange whip as:
1. the return is redundant
2. the EventArgs are unused
3. you are implicitly relying on this being a Control, and sender (if a Control), being both created by the same thread.
Maybe what you intended was this:
private void ToggleEnable(object sender,System.EventArgs e) {
System.Windows.Forms.Control c = sender as System.Windows.Forms.Control;
if (c!=null) {
if (c.InvokeRequired) {
c.Invoke(new System.EventHandler(ToggleEnable), sender, e);
} else {
c.Enabled = !c.Enabled;
}
}
}
(or same without EventArgs)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]
I only read formatted code with indentation, so please use PRE tags for code snippets.
I'm not participating in frackin' Q&A, so if you want my opinion, ask away in a real forum (or on my profile page).
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