net reactor & clickonce deployment

Question

After building our VB.NET .exe it is then obfuscated using the 3rd-party .NET Reactor utility before the output of that is included within a VS2005 deployment project. Is there a way of replacing the .exe with the scrambled version prior to then publishing using click-once ?

Has anyone managed to deploy with click once, a net reactor protected application?

Answer 1

You can but not using the standard ClickOnce deployment scheme. One way is to make a MSBuild task that takes your files and creates the ClickOnce manifest with the obfuscated file. The basic issue is that once you change the file after a manifest has been created it invalidates the file, leading to a non-working ClickOnce deployment.

Answer 2

Sorry if wasting your time but what is wrong with this one?

In the post build events command line i am using the following:

"C:\Program Files\Eziriz.NET Reactor\dotNET_Reactor.exe" -file "D:\Proj0\MyApp\A3\bin\Release\MyApp.exe" -targetfile "D:\Proj0\MyApp\A3\bin\Release\MyApp_secure\MyApp.exe" -protectiontype app -necrobit 1 copy "D:\Proj0\MyApp\A3\bin\Release\MyApp_secure\MyApp.exe" "d:\Proj0\MyApp\A3\bin\Release\MyApp.exe"

and here is the output i get...

Done building project "MyApp.vbproj". Building MyApp... ALINK : error AL1047: Error importing file 'd:\Proj0\MyApp\A3\obj\Debug\MyApp.exe' -- An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

Answer 3

When I ran into the error "An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format." it indicated that I was trying to load a 32 bit DLL on a 64bit version of Windows (Vista in my case).

Answer 4

I have the same issue here. I'm trying to load a protected DLL into an unprotected .EXE. Works perfectly on 32 bit systems but gives me an error on 64 bit systems.

Did you find a solution for this yet?

Answer 5

You embed the protected files into a click once project that extracts and executes. Then publish that.