This section is a brief introduction to the SoftwareShield FingerPrint Viewer. For detailed help on how to use its features, please refer to the section on the FingerPrint Viewer itself. For more information about the FingerPrinting feature itself used throughout the SoftwareShield System, please refer to the section on FingerPrinting / Machine Locking in the Feature Guide.

A FingerPrint is a unique collection of information from a particular machine which helps to uniquely identify that machine. See the section on FingerPrinting / Machine Locking in the Feature Guide for more detailed information.

The FingerPrint Viewer is a utility program that allows you to inspect intermediate and final FingerPrint values. Its features are also available internally in the License Manager, but used as a stand-alone application (FingerPrintViewer.exe) it can be run on any machine - even where the SoftwareShield SDK is not installed. This allows you to take the program into the field at a customers location if you need to field test or in some cases pre-configure a copy-protected license, or quickly test a variety of machine configurations in your testing process.

Viewing FingerPrint values can be useful to you as the developer when you are making the decisions regarding how and if you choose to Machine Lock your license. The FingerPrint Viewer allows you to inspect exactly what values are being interrogated on a machine to create the FingerPrint itself. It also allow you to see the generated FingerPrints themselves (which are simply cryptographically secure hashes of the output of the interrogation).

If you are uncertain how a particular configuration of machine will react internally to your choice of FingerPrints, you can simply copy the Viewer to the host machine, run it, set your FingerPrint Options Code and generate the output. This output can be saved for future reference, or forwarded to other developers for inspection.

Following is an image of the FingerPrint Output tab of the viewer showing a typical output.