Professional Visual Studio® 2008

29.4. Attributes

In the previous example you saw how to choose which types and methods to obfuscate within Dotfuscator. Of course, if you were to start using a different obfuscating product you would have to configure it to exclude the public members. It would be more convenient to be able to annotate your code with attributes indicating whether a symbol should be obfuscated. You can do this by using the Obfuscation and ObfuscationAssemblyAttribute attributes.

The default behavior in Dotfuscator is to ignore the obfuscation attributes in favor of any exclusions specified in the project. In Figure 29-4 there are a series of checkboxes for each assembly added to the project, of which the top checkbox is Honor Obfuscation Attributes. A limitation with the Community edition of Dotfuscator is that you can't control this feature for each assembly. You can apply this feature to all assemblies using the second button from the right on the Toolbar.

29.4.1. ObfuscationAssemblyAttribute

The ObfuscationAssemblyAttribute attribute can be applied to an assembly to control whether it should be treated as a class library or as a private assembly. The distinction is that with a class library it is expected that other assemblies will be referencing the public types and methods it exposes. As such, the obfuscation tool needs to ensure that these symbols are not renamed. Alternatively, as a private assembly, every symbol can be potentially renamed. The following is the Visual Basic syntax for