How to prevent my .NET DLL to be decompiled?

By design .NET embeds rich Meta data inside the executable code using
MSIL.Any one can easily decompile your DLL back using tools like ILDASM
( owned by Microsoft) or Reflector for .NET which is a third party.
Secondly there are many third party tools which make this decompiling
process a click away. So any one can easily look in to your assemblies
and reverse engineer them back in to actual source code and understand
some real good logic which can make easy to crack your application.

The process by which you can stop this reverse engineering is using
"obfuscation". It's a technique which will foil the decompilers.
There are many third parties (XenoCode, Demeanor for .NET) which
provide .NET obfuscation solution. Microsoft includes one that is
Dotfuscator Community Edition with Visual Studio.NET.

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"Jobs" <jobatyourdoorstep (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.in> wrote

Write it in VB6

--
Ken Halter - MS-MVP-VB - Please keep all discussions in the groups..
DLL Hell problems? Try ComGuard - http://www.vbsight.com/ComGuard.htm
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On 20 Feb 2006 10:04:34 -0800, "Jobs" <jobatyourdoorstep (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.in> wrote:
in <1140458674.339657.186700 (AT) o13g2000cwo (DOT) googlegroups.com>

This is by design enabling the entire developer community to unwittingly work
for microsoft.

---
Stefan Berglund

Thus the reason why we remain using VB6 (the other reason is the insanely
large .net framework). If you don't want your work decompiled (like every
other company selling code for profit), stick with VB6, move to C++
(unmanaged), or I suppose Delphi would also be a good choice in this regard,
although I am not familiar with it (I hear it is nice though). If you
absolutely have to use .NET, pick the best obfuscation tool money can buy,
or, try to keep your project an ASP.net (server-side) project.


- Anthony


"Jobs" wrote:

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:40:18 -0800, "=?Utf-8?B?QW50aG9ueQ==?="
<Anthony (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote:

Delphi is very nice
- while I am not that fond of 'Non BASIC' syntax, one can do amazing
things with it very easily

- and when you accept a syntax that is infinatelely less obscure than
C or CPP, then it is pretty readable.

The word is that Delphi is in play
- if they came out with a version of VB that gave :-

Message WM_NCMBUTTONDBLCLK( Msg )
...
End Message

I suspect that people would get very interested.