How to change the assemblyIdentity of an executable?

Question

I want to hide the tool I used to create an .exe file. I am not doing anything illegal, I just want to protect my intellectual property from being copied. If I open the exe file in a text editor I see the following section.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
<assemblyIdentity
    version="XXX.XX"
    processorArchitecture="X86"
    name="Microsoft.Windows.NameOfTheTool"
    type="win32"
/>
</assembly>

I have attempted to change the name to:
name="Microsoft.Windows.SomeOtherName"

This resulted in the following message when I attempted to execute the file. "This application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect."

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

I've never changed the manifest data, but it might be possible. You should check the linker options.

Regardless, an exe packer like .NETZ may obfuscate things sufficiently.

Now that I look again: the name attribute should be the name of your assembly, not the program (such as VisualStudio) used to create it. If it's not, you'll have to tell us more for us to figure out why. If your program is really script that's fed into some other program, all bets are off.