password protection

[san_k4]

I am outsourcing some of my drawings.i want to give my utilities that I have developed in vba to the offloading agency,to improve the quality/productivity of the drawing preparation.i want to secure my code.i have heard that there are Software utilities to crack the password and view the code.how far it is true and what is the way out.i would be very
Greatful to you all for sharing your knowledge and experience on this.
Regards,

santhosh

[Ed Jobe]

Yes, its true. If you think that you can't trust the ones you give your project to not attempt to crack the password, then you should use vb (not vba) to compile your code to a dll.

[san_k4]

Thanks for the reply.this has made me to ask a few more doubts.
Earlier i have done one small utility in vb where I was doing some design calculation and writing the corresponding text in drawing .here I was calling the acadapplication
Object and then accessing the drawing.This was done as an exe file.i have 2 qustions.
1.my current application requires a lot of picking entities from the screen.does
accessing acad from outside(vb) make the process a little slower.?I don’t
mind tolerating some amount of slowness. pl. throw some light on this aspect. also
i would be happy to know if u could give some basic ideas in choosing between exe/dll.
( my programming knowledge is limited outside lisp/acad vba..)
2.how far the code that I have already written in vba can be used if I migrate to vb.

Regards,
SANTHOSH

[richard.binning]

If you create a dll and call it from within your vba app, you'll find the response acceptable. Anytime you are working from a vb generated exe file, you are working out of process and the responsiveness will be somewhat delayed.

RLB

[Ed Jobe]

To add to what Richard said...
If you are concerned about code security, think of it this way. The part that you want to secure, put in the dll. The rest in the vba dvb that Richard mentioned is just minimal basic stuff to initialize and call your dll. You could even use lisp for this "front end".