Lutz Roeder's Reflector Is Magic
I demonstrated Lutz Roeder's Reflector to a colleague yesterday. The response was classic and very true. His eyes shifted side-to-side in alarm. "Holy f*ck," he whispered, "Is this common knowledge?"If you haven't tinkered with it yet, then please tinker. If you don't know what Lutz Roeder's Reflector is -- well. It 'decompiles' any .net 'exe' or 'dll' into perfectly legible C#, or VB.net or Intermediate Language or even Delphi.net. All in a handy 0.3 Meg download. Wow.
'blameMike' on Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:09:45 GMT, sez: When I first ran it against my company's flagship product, my response was quite similar to your colleague's.
That's when I gave obfuscation a serious look.
'secretGeek' on Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:33:54 GMT, sez: too right Mike. my colleague then started looking into obfuscation as well.
we decided that for a lot of the bespoke work we do, obfuscation isn't required.
a shrink-wrapped product is a different kettle of fish, of course.
but even then (as others keep saying) your only real defence is that big puffy cloud of nonsense known as the legal system. or barry to his mates.
for really special secretive algorithms, the best option is to host them on your own servers and let the apps call them via web services/remoting/rpc. but this is not all that convenient ya'know.
obfuscation is powerful stuff, but nothing compared to a truly messy developer.
cheers
lb
'Ryan Farley' on Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:43:06 GMT, sez: No doubt, reflector is "da bomb". Can hardly go a day without loading it up!
-Ryan
'tool' on Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:21:23 GMT, sez: Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/07/MustHaveTools/default.aspx
Others:
NDepend
http://smacchia.chez.tiscali.fr/NDepend.html
log4net
http://logging.apache.org/log4net/
NAnt
http://nant.sourceforge.net/
WAST
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/itsolutions/intranet/downloads/webstres.mspx
Windows Application Verifier
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/appcompatibility/appverifier.mspx
'Angus Logan' on Fri, 27 Aug 2004 09:59:37 GMT, sez: As I am said colleague, please don't bleep my swear words!
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