[Green Girl]

Well here goes, hopefully someone knows and can guide me. I have a open source/freeware freely distributable by its inherent license, "application", that was successfully compiled in the new Visual Studio 2008 by me. Yay! It runs and works as it should. But, I am looking for a way to protect the compiled Executable from future decompilation since it has some sensitive modifications to it. I have tried a few utilities out there which claim to protect .NET executables and found nothing so far which has actually worked for me, (i.e. just corrupts the end .EXE into useless garbage). But I did find one utility which seems good, so I am hopeful - but it didn't work fully, however it gave me a little more information (a clue?) as to why it couldn't proceed to protect this EXE. It is a pretty expensive package, so I am curious to as why I am failing to protect a proper VB08 created executable.

.... the message I see is "The module was expected to contain an assembly manifest". What is this exactly and is this something that should already be in my source code or something *(please forgive me I am still a learning newbie).... is this something I can procedurally create or can be created -prior- to compiling the VB08 source code into Executable format? What the heck?

Have a great day and thank you in advance for tips and guidance.

Best wishes, Green Girl.

This post has been edited by Green Girl: 20 December 2007 - 04:53 PM

[Jayman]

You can find an explanation of what an assembly manifest is at the following link.

Assembly Manifest

However, if you are using the Professional version of VS then you already have a tool available to obfuscate your code.

You can find it on the Tools menu, it is called Dotfuscator Community Edition. If you are using the free version then I believe you have to purchase it.

Getting started with Dotfuscator

[Green Girl]

jayman9, on 20 Dec, 2007 - 04:58 PM, said:

You can find an explanation of what an assembly manifest is at the following link.

Assembly Manifest

However, if you are using the Professional version of VS then you already have a tool available to obfuscate your code.

You can find it on the Tools menu, it is called Dotfuscator Community Edition. If you are using the free version then I believe you have to purchase it.

Getting started with Dotfuscator

Hi there JayMan9

I am actually using the Professional Version :-)

But strangely, with the same .EXE created by this VB 08 PRO, ... the Dotfuscator whereupon inputting this .EXE generates this message:

Invalid Assembly: C:\MyFile.exe. Invalid Input Assembly: C:\MyFile.exe This is not a managed module (C:\MyFile.exe).

What could I be doing wrong in this process??

Greetings

[Green Girl]

Hey JayMan, did you know the answer -- no worries, I know this is new software, so maybe you didn't have a chance to look into it yet. Best regards, GG

[Nayana]

Does it work if you make a new (empty) project, and try it on that?

[Jayman]

Green Girl, on 26 Dec, 2007 - 09:35 PM, said:

Hey JayMan, did you know the answer -- no worries, I know this is new software, so maybe you didn't have a chance to look into it yet. Best regards, GG

Sorry but I have never actually used the Dotfuscator. So I am afraid I am going to be of little help there.