Microsoft's anti-piracy platform has evolved past its germination period In Redmond Utero. The Redmond company announced that the first version of the Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection Platform is live. The Software Licensing and Protection Platform, which can be considered a quasi-equivalent of the Windows Genuine Advantage mechanism, is available to Independent Software Vendors and is designed to be included into third party software products in order to protect the products from piracy. Microsoft promised that ISVs will have the freedom not only to choose the way they will package their software, but also a variety of licensing models at their disposal, from traditional agreements to pay-per-use scenarios.

"We've now properly launched our Version 1 of Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection Platform. We shipped three days early. Not a record here at Microsoft, but somewhat of a rarity in the world of software. It takes just a tad bit more effort beyond declaring code complete, test run completion and final signoff. When there's a service involved you get a chance to do a whole heck of a lot more work before you get to call it done. It's roughly the same things customers will go through if they decide to host our server... with a few notable differences," revealed Terrence Nevins - Program Manager: Microsoft Licensing and Protection Platform.

The backbone of the Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection Platform is essentially the Code Protector, set in place to safeguard .NET code. Hacking techniques such as disassembling and decompilation permit the reverse engineering of .NET code, but through Code Transformation, Microsoft ensures that such approaches become almost impossible. "Using Microsoft's unique technology called Code Transformation, the SLP Code Protector takes selected DLL's and functions within the DLL and virtually compiles (transforms) them into a vendor specific format called Secure Virtual Machine Language (SVML). The functions that are transformed to SVML format appear like regular MSIL function (in terms of interfaces), but are much harder to reverse engineer. Furthermore, SVML runs on top of the .NET platform (CLR), to help ensure interoperability and code optimization," Microsoft informed.