As I mentioned in one of my recent posts, one of the two most frequently asked questions about the .NET development is how to protect your intellectual property – in other words, how to prevent people from decompiling the code (IL) into the source (Lutz Roeder’s Reflector is a great tool that shows how easy the process is with the right tool, it can even decompile into several different languages).

Naturally, a sub-market emerged populated with the tools – obfuscators – that will make decompiled code extremely hard to read. It is still a young segment even though there are several solid players in it with products that vary a lot in the price and the capabilities.

I have tried a few of these tools and I have generally been unimpressed. The whole process is too hard and requires a lot of fine tuning. Thus when my friend Vladimir decided to build an obfuscator that will require very little fuss, be deeply integrated into the Visual Studio 2005 and work reliably well with all the modern language features like generics, I jumped at the opportunity to beta test it.

So far, it worked really, really well. It has a clear, step by step wizard-like interface, uses sensible defaults and generates a great preview of what the resulting code will look like. In a few places where the code did crash because of the obfuscation, it was really easy to see why (data binding in the .NET 2.0 uses reflection with the names of properties as strings, so you need to exclude these properties from obfuscation). If you’d like to give it a try, a public beta is available since yesterday on the Outer Self blog (Assemblur’s web site is still under construction).

Highly recommended.