Signing
an ActiveX Control is also the first step towards licensing it.
Signing
a control is something you have to pay a third party to do
- A company like Verisign will evaluate an ActiveX Control
to determine both whether it is purposefully malicious (that
it might deliberately cause harm to the client PC, that is)
and whether the control itself has any unintended security
problems. If the signing authority determine that the integrity
of the client system is not threatened by the control they
will assign it a digital signature.
There
are, of course, costs involved in this and you should bear
in mind that every time you recreate the ocx file (finding
and correcting a typo on the control or tweaking the hue of
a graphic then recompiling the project) your digital signature
becomes invalid. You will then have to resubmit (and pay again)
for a fresh evaluation.
If
you're implementing the control on an intranet it is cheaper
and just as effective to set up the intranet zone security
to run the control and forget all about signing it.
If
you have had your control evaluated and signed you will need
to add a license file to protect it from illicit use. (Everyone
wants a control that says Click me, afetr all!) You
can - I'm told - also license an unsigned ocx or ActiveX cab
file although I'm not sure who would use it!
Microsoft
provide a licensing tool called LPK (Search microsoft.com for
LPKTool or, if you have a Visual Studio CD you should be able
to find a version in the Tools folder)
If
you run LPK_Tool.exe you can select the ActiveX Control you
want to license and when you click on Add, to add the control
to the licenced software collection, LPK creates a licence file.
You can then save the licence file (Project1.lpk, for instance)
and use it in the control's parameters on the web page: |
