Preventing Reverse Engineering of .NET Code

[Ben]

Hi

I have a client that has developed some complex methods of analysing data
over many years.

He wishes this to be put into a VB .NET program to sell to his clients.

What is the potential that his clients can reverse engineer this program to
gain access to the code? In addition what methods can I use to prevent
this?

Many thanks
B

 

[Carlos J. Quintero [VB MVP]]

Hi Ben,

Unless you obfuscate the assembly, using a tool like .NET Reflector
(http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/) with some add-ins for that tool that
render files on disk or even VS.NET projects, his clients can have
crystal-clear code. To prevent this you need a .NET obfuscator, which
renames symbols making the code much more difficult to understand. There are
at least 10 in the .NET market, so do a Google search, read about them to
get familiar with the concept and test some ones.

--

Best regards,

Carlos J. Quintero

MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio .NET, VB6, VB5 and VBA
You can code, design and document much faster.
Free resources for add-in developers:
http://www.mztools.com

 

[Ben]

Carlos

Many thanks for your post

I know this is the wrong newsgroup for this next question but is the problem
the same for VB6 programs?

Thanks
B

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

I know this is the wrong newsgroup for this next question but is the
problem
the same for VB6 programs?

No.

 

[Carlos J. Quintero [VB MVP]]

Not to the same extent, because VB6 compiles to either p-code or native
code, much more difficult to decompile, while all .NET managed languages
compile to Microsoft Intermediate Language (IL) on disk, which in turn is
compiled to native code at run-time (just-in-time compilation) if you have
not used NGen to compile to native on disk. It happens that MS IL, like Java
bytecodes, is very easy to decompile...

Best regards,

Carlos J. Quintero

MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio .NET, VB6, VB5 and VBA
You can code, design and document much faster.
Free resources for add-in developers:
http://www.mztools.com