Easy Way To Create A Virtual Portable Environment For Your Application

29 Nov 2008

Easy Way To Create A Virtual Portable Environment For Your Application

Imagine a PC user, who wants his application to run properly even though it has no registry rights. Or the application that uses secure DLL and files which can't be saved on disk. Or imagine that an application requires ActiveX, but the user doesn't have the installer to run it now. And this when BoxedApp SDK comes!

November 29, St. Petersburg, Russia: Softanics today announces the release of BoxedApp SDK 1.2, a new version of a popular application virtualization library. The library enables creating a portable application with zero installation that relies on the virtual environment to run. BoxedApp SDK emulates the file system and system registry for an application. Using this software, a user can create portable, self-contained files with virtual registry entries, keys and values. By adding virtual files, BoxedApp SDK will make the application consider that such files already exist on the PC.

"We are excited to be releasing new BoxedApp SDK," says Artem A. Razin, CTO, Softanics. "The number of requests for virtualization technologies is growing rapidly today. I think our solution will help many people to easily make applications virtual at an affordable price".

Here is an example of how BoxedApp SDK works:

Supposing an application requires a Flash ActiveX player in order to play a video file, but the developer cannot rely on a user to have this component installed. This is exactly when BoxedApp SDK offers a way out. The user simply creates a virtual file that contains the Flash movie, a virtual file that contains the Flash player ActiveX DLL, and virtual registry entries that point to that virtual file. That's it. Now the application "thinks" that the Flash player ActiveX is actually installed and the player runs just as if the movie file was actually on the hard disk.

BoxedApp SDK allows creating portable applications that run from CD-ROMs, USB flash drives or a PC, even when a user has no administrator rights to install software. Another benefit of the software is that the exclusive content - graphics, animation and audio can be hidden from illegal copying and re-using. To provide efficient security, all the data is stored in a single EXE file. Instead of being copied to a hard disk where anyone can easily access them, the files are streamed directly from the memory.

BoxedApp SDK allows embedding all DLL and content files, all ActiveX and OCX components, and even .NET runtime, used by the application, into a single EXE file, that runs as an isolated application, without any changes of the PC file system or registry. All the data is unpacked directly to the memory and is kept in virtual registry. No temporary files are used. Following the "best practices" recommendations from Microsoft, BoxedApp SDK is made to run completely in a user mode, for the benefit of the system stability and security.

Implementing the library is as easy as pie - just add a few code lines into an application and it's all done.

Read more at: http://boxedapp.com/. The website offers many examples how to" virtualize" .NET assembly, FlashPlayer ActiveX, DLLs. Examples are available for most programming languages.