Visual Studio Hacks

Examine the Innards of Assemblies #64

Chapter 7, Help and Research

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251

HACK

Seeing that Reflector can provide source code view of an

assembly might give you pause if your company generates its

revenue from selling a .NET application. The last thing

you’d likely be interested in is having your customers—or

worse, your competitors—examining the source code of the

application. There’s no way to prevent anyone from viewing

the IL of a .NET assembly (and thereby disassembling it to

C# or Visual Basic), but you can obfuscate the IL. Obfusca-

tion is the process of changing the IL so that it still behaves

as intended, but is illegible and unreadable for a human. A

number of .NET obfuscation products —such as: PreEmp-

tive Solution's Dotfuscator

[Hack #80], WiseOwl’s Demeanor,

and Remotesoft’s .NET Obfuscator—are available.

Additional Reflector Features

In addition to serving as an object browser and disassembler, Reflector can

display call and callee graphs for class and class members, offer one-click

access to search Google or MSDN, and provide a framework that allows

third-party developers to create add-ins for Reflector.

To view the call or callee graphs, simply select a member in the tree view,

go to the Tools menu, and select the Call Graph or Callee Graph option.

The Call Graph lists the members called by the selected item, whereas the

Callee Graph lists those members that call the selected item. For