UpdateShield Professional

UpdateShield Professional is a powerful and approachable application suite that can help you protect your software products from reverse engineering, as well as integrate automatic updates.

It contains two separate tools: the UpdateShield Integrator and Builder. While the Integrator asks you to follow a few easy steps in a wizard, the Builder has richer features which are equally intuitive. In either case, you don't have to worry about inserting any lines of code.

Once the Integrator is launched, you can specify a program file that will be used to create a protected version. You can view the program type, edit the target name and path, as well as set the app as a service, if that's the case. It's also possible to set a program ID and tinker with settings when it comes to the protection method (e.g. injection, EXE scramble).

Anti-debugging and anti-tracing schemes are included, and you can optimize shell protection, encrypt the code to prevent crackers from decompiling it, as well as generate a self-checksum to prevent code modification. Each of these three options can be enabled with one click.

Automatic software update integration is optional. It can be set to always perform auto-update or only if the subscription is valid, and to terminate the application before executing the downloaded update.

To enhance your software product's protection, you can set it to operate as one process by assigning a unique name (this is applicable only to Win32/64/.NET apps). Plus, when it triggers errors in the background process, the program can be terminated without confirmation prompt.

Before proceeding with the UpdateShield integration, you can review actions and save the template with predefined settings to file, so that you can use it in future projects.

Once the integration is over, you can examine results concerning the time and date, enhanced protection mode, identification, and other details (a log file is automatically created).

In the following stage, you can ask UpdateShield to create the index files. This brings up the Builder in a fullscreen window that lets you set the index file title, version number, client side index file properties (server side index or web service URL), server side index file properties (download and description URLs), along with the output index files for both the client and server.

The client's updater files may be customized in terms of appearance and options. For instance, you can choose the style (e.g. wizard, compact), show the updater's icon in the system tray, check for software updates at every app startup, set the checkup frequency, edit the caption prefix, and indicate the executable file to launch or command lines to execute.

Meanwhile, the online installer can be asked to run at startup for installation and auto-update. You can specify its checkup frequency too, embed scripts to extract them in the downloaded files location, and point out the online installer path or file name, together with the runtime icon file, background and banner images.

You can log into an FTP account, get the release and system identification codes, write notes, save the project to file and resume it later, manage multiple projects and use a search function, as well as edit the program name.

UpdateShield Professional worked smoothly in our tests, without hanging, crashing or prompting error messages. Its impact on computer performance was minimal.

Taking into account its comprehensive features and intuitive configuration parameters, UpdateShield Professional lives up to its name when it comes to protecting code and implementing auto-updates into your software products.

NOTE: You can also check out UpdateShield Express.