Should you obfuscate a commercial .Net application?

by

You may not have to buy a tool – Visual Studio.NET comes with a community version of Dotfuscator. Other free obfuscation tools are listed here, and they may meet your needs.

It’s possible that the obfuscated binaries aren’t safe from reverse engineering, just like it’s possible that your bike lock might be breakable/pickable. However, it’s often the case that a small inconvenience is enough to deter would be code/bicycle thieves.

Also, if ever it comes time to assert your rights to a piece of code in court, having been seen to make an effort to protect it (by obfuscating it) may give you extra points. 🙂

You do have to consider the downsides, though – it can be more difficult to use reflection with obfuscated code, and if you’re using something like log4net to generate parts of log lines based on the name of the class involved, these messages can become much more difficult to interpret.

More Related Contents:

  1. Protect .NET code from reverse engineering?
  2. Protect .NET code from reverse engineering?
  3. Alternative for Obfuscation in the .NET world
  4. Should ‘using’ directives be inside or outside the namespace?
  5. What’s the difference between Invoke() and BeginInvoke()
  6. Type or namespace name does not exist [closed]
  7. Is it possible to “steal” an event handler from one control and give it to another?
  8. When should “SqlDbType” and “size” be used when adding SqlCommand Parameters?
  9. Generating DLL assembly dynamically at run time
  10. How to convert a Unicode character to its ASCII equivalent
  11. What does “DateTime?” mean in C#?
  12. Find Recursive Group Membership (Active Directory) using C#
  13. How do I create a HashCode in .net (c#) for a string that is safe to store in a database?
  14. Reflection – Getting the generic arguments from a System.Type instance
  15. Instantiate an object with a runtime-determined type
  16. What is the point of Lookup?
  17. How to execute a command in a remote computer?
  18. For i = 0, why is (i += i++) equal to 0?
  19. WPF User Control Parent
  20. Deserialize JSON string to Dictionary
  21. Shortest way to check for null and assign another value if not
  22. When to use a SortedList over a SortedDictionary?
  23. Capture screen on server desktop session
  24. Non Public Members for C# Interfaces [closed]
  25. How do I know what monitor a WPF window is in
  26. Change db table name in EF4 (entity framework 4)
  27. .NET 4.5 Bug in UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity (System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement)
  28. How to round decimal value up to nearest 0.05 value?
  29. Remove empty string properties from json serialized object
  30. Select item programmatically in WPF ListView

Leave a Comment