SafeNet has an application called Sentinel RMS. Sentinel RMS is a suite of applications that help one company license out its software. One of my current projects requires me to use Sentinel RMS within a Microsoft .NET framework using C#. I had a couple of problems setting up the example solutions SafeNet gave out, so I thought I’d document them here. There’s probably not that many people who will use Sentinel RMS but I did run into a problem that might well be generally useful:

API call fail with message:System.BadImageFormatException: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B) at SentinelRMSCore.Interface.LSAPI.VLSinitialize() at SentinelRMSCore.RMSDKCore.VLSinitialize():VLSinitialize API call fail with error-code:501

While the manual for Sentinel RMS was pretty good it was all about the API’s and how to call them. The documentation was missing a How to get started section that would describe how to set up Visual Studio. There is a brief few lines saying which version of Visual Studio are supported but that’s about it.

1. Download SDK RMS 8.5.0 Windows 32 and 64-bit GA release (you can get this from your support representative)
2. Download the Sentinel RMS 8.4.1 .Net Interface (you can get this from your support representative)
3. Unpack and install the SDK.
4. Add the following DLL folder to your PATH:

   C:\Program Files (x86)\SafeNet Sentinel\Sentinel RMS Development Kit\8.5\English\MsvcDev\Lib\MSVS2008\Win32\DLL\

   This will allow the C# assemblies to find the required DLLs.
5. Unpack the .Net Interface.
6. Navigate to RMS 8.4.1 .NET Interface\Examples
7. Create a folder called Libraries
8. Copy the contents of RMS 8.4.1 .NET Interface\Library into the RMS 8.4.1 .NET Interface\Examples\Libraries folder
9. Navigate to RMS 8.4.1 .NET Interface\Examples\VisualC#\AddRemoveLicense
10. Double click the solution file (.sln) to launch Visual Studio. The documentation says that only Microsoft Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008 is supported so make sure its one of those.
11. When the solution loads in, right-click on the project name and select Properties.
12. Under the Application tab change the Target Framework to 3.5.
13. Under the Build tab change the Platform Target to x86.
14. Then save, clean solution, rebuild solution and run.

I found that if you didn’t add the DLL folder to the PATH then I got the following error message, and in order to fix it I had to manually copy the lsapiw32.dll into the Release/Debug folder. There didn’t seem to be anywhere in visual studio that let you add extra DLL search folders because it is rubbish.

API call fail with message:System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL ‘lsapiw32.dll’: The specified module could not be found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E) at SentinelRMSCore.Interface.LSAPI.VLSinitialize() at SentinelRMSCore.RMSDKCore.VLSinitialize():VLSinitialize API call fail with error-code:501

The other problem, which is probably more generally useful, was that of the System.BadImageFormatException exception. This occurs when the Common Language Runtime (CLR) tries to load an assembly that contains unmanaged code built targeting a different platform (thanks Dave). In my case with Sentinal, the lsapiw32.dll was compiled with the platform x86 for the 32-bit version of the DLL. Visual Studio defaults to building for a target platform of Any and this discrepancy is what causes the error. Equally if I had chosen to fill the Libraries folder with DLLs from the Library(x64) folder (and the corresponding C:\Program Files (x86)\SafeNet Sentinel\Sentinel RMS Development Kit\8.5\English\MsvcDev\Lib\MSVS2008\Win64\DLL) instead then I would have had exactly the same problem.