Advice re moving VBA project into compiled code

[SuzyDavis]

Hi there, I am a Microsoft Word developer and I sell Microsoft Office solutions, to companies. I am beginning to be concerned that my solutions are being copied - which is fairly easy.

I am hoping someone can give me some advice about the best way to do this.
I don't really have much of an understanding outside of Office VBA development - but have dabbled in .NET and VB in the past. Should I be buying Visual Studio - if so, does it matter if I buy Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 - I will initially need to convert some Word 2007. I have previously downloaded the .NET framework, and not sure how this relates to Visual Studio.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance
Suzy

[the_carpenter]

Don't think that moving to Visual Studio .net is going to protect your code.

Redgate's .Net Reflector (http://www.red-gate.com) can quickly show you how open .Net executables and libraries can be.

I have used one tool to combat code theft by decompilers and hacks. So I maybe a bit bias when it comes to my opinion.

A company called Eziriz (http://www.eziriz.com) has a tool called .Net Reactor which completely encrypts any .exe or .dll compiled in Visual Studio .net but still makes the .exe completely usable.

[SuzyDavis]

Thanks - I suspected that there is possibly no real solution, but I can at least minimise what I make available by getting it out of the vba environment.

So first step is to use Visual Studio and put it into executable or dlls as a first step and then encrypt.

Does it matter which version of Visual Studio I use?

thanks again
Suzy

[the_carpenter]

Not really... I would go with the most recent. Microsoft doesn't like to much to have to support older versions of their software. So if you ever have an incident with them, you don't want them to solve it by saying "Upgrade"