How to protect HtmlHelper code in MVC controls

Question

I am writing a custom mvc control (commercial), and all of the control's code lives in the custom htmlhelper code that i will have to distribute to the user.

I am ok with this for my commercial license sale, but for evaluating the controls, if i give out the htmlhelper code locally for my potential customers to evaluate, the user can simply "get" all the code and hence he may never buy it since he's got teh control code.

How do i protect my htmlhelper code while somebody is evaluation my cusotm mvc controls?

Is this a general problem or (I wish) i am missing something here?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Instead of giving code, you can give assembly and documentation. You can also use obfuscator to make your code less readable. Here you can find some questions about obfuscation: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=obfuscator+.net. There are some free tools to obfuscate code ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2161201/free-net-obfuscator ).