getting into Smart Assembly

Krischu

Hi, I'm new to Smart Assembly. I registered today to learn about the way SA is being used.

A developer of the company I'm working for has left the company and before he left he
gave us an email and password under which he had registered the SA service.

I tried this on this website to no avail.

I need to gather some information:

1. how can I see from our software development tree, which version of SA is being used?
2. When SA is enabled, where do crash reports go? I.e., where can I lookup our crash reports?
3. As far as I understood, there is either a free or low fee way to use SA. Where can I read about it
and the conditions for its use?

I will try to reach the fellow but for now I'd be grateful if someone could anwer my questions.
Thank you.

--
Christoph

Jessica R

Hi and thanks for your post!

Our forum is separate from our main site, so the former developer may have used his email for purchasing on the main site but may not have registered it for the forums. Apologies for any confusion on this!

Regarding your queries:

1. how can I see from our software development tree, which version of SA is being used?

I'm not sure how to check this from the version control system you have, but you can always check the SA version used on an assembly by opening the assembly in a decompiling tool. It will have a "PoweredBy" assembly attribute with the version of SA used. For example:

[assembly: PoweredBy("Powered by SmartAssembly 6.8.1.60")]

2. When SA is enabled, where do crash reports go? I.e., where can I lookup our crash reports?

SmartAssembly stores your error error reports as well as information about each of your builds in a database (by default, the database.mdb in C:ProgramDataRed GateSmartAssembly).

When someone sends in a report for you, the reports will first be sent to a Red Gate server. Then when you download reports, they will be downloaded and inserted into the database you've configured SmartAssembly to use and then deleted off the Red Gate server.

When you view reports (Reporting>View Error Reports), SmartAssembly will show you all of the reports that are in your database.

With that, you'll need to make sure that you have access to the same database that the former developer was using. This will allow you to view previously sent in reports and also allow you to download new reports (if SmartAssembly doesn't have access to a copy of this database with all the information about the previous builds when it downloads a new error report, it will fail to download that report since the database relies heavily on foreign keys).

If you're moving SmartAssembly to another machine than the one the former developer was using, we have some documentation on this: https://documentation.red-gate.com/disp ... r+computer

You can also find the documentation on downloading and managing error reports here: https://documentation.red-gate.com/disp ... or+reports

3. As far as I understood, there is either a free or low fee way to use SA. Where can I read about it
and the conditions for its use?

It sounds like you may be referring to the Developer edition.

There are 3 editions of SmartAssembly: Pro, Standard, and Developer

The Pro edition offers all of the possible protection features, while the Standard edition has less options and is a bit lower in price.

The last one, the Developer edition, is much less than both the Pro and Standard editions. This is because although you can enable all possible protection features as the Pro edition, the builds made by a Developer edition are unreleasable--they only run on machines where SmartAssembly is installed and expire after two weeks. They're meant to be used only as an add-on to a "full" license (either Pro or Standard), for other developers or testers to use for testing obfuscation on their local machines and viewing error reports.

You can read more about the differences and pricing here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet ... ly/pricing

I hope this info helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.