Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 10, Work with Visual Studio Tools

#80 Obfuscate Your Code

HACK

inside” compiled assemblies. If this is alarming, it should be. After all, you

may have class libraries with highly confidential business logic—if that logic

were to fall into the wrong hands, you could lose your competitive advan-

tage. Luckily, Visual Studio contains a tool named Dotfuscator that you can

use to make sure that the output of a decompiler is as close to gibberish as

possible.

Create a Dotfuscator Project

To use the Dotfuscator, you’ll first need to create a project in Visual Studio

and compile it (in this case, I’ve created a project with a class named Simple-

Math). Then create a Dotfuscator Project for your assembly by following

these steps:

1. On the Visual Studio menu, click Tools

➝ Dotfuscator Community Edi-

tion. This will start the Dotfuscator.

2. At the Select Project Type dialog box, choose Create New Project and

click OK. You’ll now see a tool with several tabs along the top

(Figure 10-25).

Although several tabs and numerous options can be configured in the

Dotfuscator, you need to configure two items at a minimum to create an

obfuscated assembly. They are the trigger file(s) and the build destina-

tion directory. Once these two options are set, you can save the Dotfus-

cator Project for use later. Dotfuscator Projects are saved in XML

format.

Figure 10-24. Performance counters statistics