Setting up an Automatic Install

Question

I am trying to set up an automatic uninstaller for a program. basically I want the program to uninstall after a certain time has passed (lets say 1 year).

Is there any way I could do this? It would basically be a trial version of the software.

Sorry for not being specific about this but i just want some options on how I could do this easily.

Thank You in advance for your responses and sorry for my bad English.

Answer 1

I have never seen such a design. I suppose you could use a scheduled Windows task, but why do this? You can just have the application expire after a year and offer a button on launch to kick off the uninstaller? It can launch the uninstall asynchronously and shut down the application right away.

Answer 2

I have also never seen such a design, likely because it fails to consider several issues, namely how do you keep users from:

• reinstalling it?
• installing it on another machine, or on a VM with snapshots?
• restoring a hard drive backup over it?
• killing the uninstallation?

Software licensing is hard to get right. I would recommend using a third-party licensing package that offers trial licensing. I would avoid trying to roll your own solution, as it will likely take you a lot of time to develop and be ineffective nonetheless. Picking the right product for this depends on first answering some questions, though:

• How a. skilled and how b. determined will the adversaries be who are costing you the most amount of financial loss? That is determined by:
• How much money will you lose if you don't protect it? This should determine the next question, which is:
• What is your budget for software protection? It should be less than the amount you would lose without it. This should include the next question, which is:
• How many hours do you want to invest to get this working?

It sounds to me like you want an automated wrapper that will work with precompiled applications / installers, as opposed to using an SDK you must integrate into your code.