The Shareware Starter Kit

Dan Fernandez's Blog : Introducing the Shareware Starter Kit

"... we have officially released the Shareware Starter Kit on Channel9!!

Download: (C# download, VB download).

The Shareware Starter Kit is a sample application of the common features in all shareware applications. You can easily modify, extend and integrate these into your own applications.

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Multi-Threaded Splash Screen
A sample Windows Form that shows how you can use a timer control to create a beautiful fade-in/fade-out effect.

Integrated E-Commerce
This feature makes purchasing a licensed copy of your software just a click away by integrating PayPal’s payment services directly into the client application using Web services.

Product Activation
Many shareware applications enable to try-before-you-buy, and this feature enables developers to control how you want to configure your application trial period. For example, you can explicitly state that your application can only be used for 30 days before activating the product. While it’s not a bullet proof mechanism, the built-in version provides a sample of how you can configure product activation.

Product Registration
This form makes it dirt simple to enable product registration directly in the product using Web services. Everyone wants to know more information about their customers, heck Visual Studio 2005 is the first version of Visual Studio with in-product registration capabilities.

Product Feedback
Do you want to know what your customers think about your application? Why not add the ability to send feedback directly in the product? This feature enables them to do just that using Web services.

Exception Handling Reporting
You’ve probably had a Windows application hang on you, where you get a “Send Error Report” message. That feature is known as Watson, and the error information is sent to Microsoft where if you have a certificate from Verisign, you can actually pull the dumps for your application. The version in the Shareware Starter Kit is the “poor-man’s Watson”, and it captures information about the thrown exception and records it in a database. That way you can report on your application crashes by date, exception type, version, operating system, all using Web services

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Very cool...

While I'm currently hostage to an IP ("You think it, we own it") contract which limits my ability to write non-work software, one day I will be able to write and distribute my own software/apps/utilities/etc. I don't know if I would go the Shareware, Free or OSS route but in any case there's some items in this Kit that I should be able use...

This post has a good bit of info on the SSK including screenshots, examples and such.

(via public abstract sergeb.Blog() {}; - Shareware Starter Kit