.NET obfuscation
2007-09-17 01:27:26.577423+02 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
All I want is to be able to tell a friend of mine "Buy this product, run it on the C# .Net Forms app that you've developed, feel like distributing it isn't going to give away everything". So I'm trying to read through the pros and cons of {smartassembly}, Remotesoft Salamander, Xenocode Postbuild and dotfuscator.
This means trying to gauge when articles were written ("Oooh, a good comparison. Oh, 2003"), gauge how trustworthy articles are (everyone claims to be the authoritative .net development source...), trying to figure out how to do this without becoming an IL expert ("Hey, free trial! That means I get to download and run your application and then try to reverse engineer the result and compare that against reverse engineering the result of other processes... there's a good use of my time!").
Unfortunately, it's too late to go grab said friend by the shirt collar, smack him a few times, and tell him he should have used something else. Besides, C# is so friendly when you first fire it up, how can it be wrong?