I'm pleased to announce that, late last week, we put out the first early access build for Smartassembly 5, Red Gate's fantastic code protection and error reporting tool, which we acquired last September. You can download it via:

http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewforum.php?f=116

It's obviously pretty early days, so please do not try to use this to protect a production application, but we've already done a lot of work in some key areas:

• We're simplifying and streamlining the licensing model (you won't see this yet, but a lot of the work on this has already been done).
• We've improved usability of the product, with a better menu, reordering of project settings, and better defaults.
• We've also fixed a load of bugs, which I'll let Alex blog about in more detail.

On a slightly more trivial level, the curly braces are also no more.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be adding more improvements, and starting usability tests. If you're interested in getting involved in the latter, please drop an email to usability@red-gate.com.