Never used visual basic before to build .exe application, but decided to have a go. The test project seems to run without any issues... I'm not exactly sure of the best way to compile|publish the project to save the application as an exe that cannot be extracted with winrar|7zip|etc... any tips appreciated.
You've just pointed out one of the few flaws of the .NET framework. Thing is, while traditional programming languages such as C and C++ compiles to native machine code, all .NET languages (including VB.NET) compiles to something called the Common Intermediate Language (CIL). You can compare CIL to Java Bytecode, as it does not execute directly on the CPU, but rather in a "virtual environment". .NET code is compiled to machine code at runtime (unlike Java) by the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and can therefore be executed on any system supporting the Runtime (as long as no platform specific Interop has been utilized). This is obviously a huge advantage when it comes to compatibility (and speed), as most standard .NET code can be executed by the Mono implementation of the .NET framework on Linux and Macintosh systems. Though, here lies our problem. Since .NET code compiles to CIL code, it can be reverse engineered quite easily. It is currently not possible to protect .NET code as you can with native code as far as I know. Your best option to protect your code would be to obfuscate it. Fun fact: All .NET languges (eg. C# and VB.NET etc) compiles to the same CIL code. Apologies if I misinterpreted your question