Protecting your .NET applications

I have often been asked questions from my readers – How do I obfuscate my application? Or how do I protect my assemblies from being disassembled? Or how do I stop my code from being reverse engineered?..and so on.The answer to all these questions is Obfuscation.

One thing to remember is that Obfuscation does not guarantee that your code cannot be reverse engineered. It makes the process of reverse engineering harder. Note: There are a couple of free and paid obfuscator tools in the market.

How efficient an Obfuscator tool is, also depends on the complexity of your code. Before investing money in such a tool, make sure you invest time in trying out these products and test their efficiency. The Dotfuscator is a third-party tool from Preemptive Solutions shipped freely with Visual Studio 2010 which obfuscates .NET applications.

To use this tool, launch Visual Studio 2010. Go to Tools > Dotfuscator Software ServicesIf you are using this tool for the first time, you will be presented with a License agreement. After accepting the license agreement, you can also register this product to get access to free updates and online support.

On the Dotfuscator UI, right click on the project and click ‘Add Assemblies’ and add an assembly of the project you have created

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