Tools that Obfuscate .NET Microsoft Office Add-in

Question

I'm working on a team developing a .NET Microsoft Office Add-in. We're looking at obfuscation solutions to help protect our licensing procedures. We're primarily looking at tools like Dotfuscator Professional and smartassembly.

My first question is whether anyone has experience using smartassembly with an Office add-ins? Dotfuscator Community Edition does not work with these, hence looking at Professional, but there is no mention of this wrinkle in smartassembly's sales materials. Any experience in that regard?

My second is whether anyone has automated the use of smartassembly with MSBuild, that is, without the benefit of Visual Studio being installed.

I respectfully want to let responders know not to waste their time commenting about the relative merits of obfuscation. I am up to date on the latest threads regarding that issue. In days of yore, kings built castles yet these sometimes fell. I still lock my front door every morning when I go to work.

Answer 1

Are you sure Dotfuscator doesn't work if you turn off renaming of public members/types (library mode)?

Answer 2

The free edition of Dotfuscator does not support obfuscating Office applications, however the Professional version does. A free evaluation version of Dotfuscator Professional edition is available from my employer (PreEmptive Solutions) which has no functionality limits and you can certainly test it out to make sure it works for you.

Dotfuscator outputs 100% peverifiable assemblies and we have not yet had any issues with Office managed code add ins.