Re: Copy protection for a .NET application

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From: Jon Skeet [C# MVP] (skeet_at_pobox.com)
Date: 11/27/04 

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:58:09 -0000

Massimo <barone@mclink.it> wrote:
> > You can skip MSIL and compile directly to machine code if you want. In
> > fact, you can obfuscate and then compile to machine code for double
> > protection. You don't have to release your program in MSIL. However, if
> > you do go straight to machine code then you will loose the cross platform
> > benefits of MSIL. That means you will have to complie separate assembiles
> > for PC, MAC and so on.
>
> Didn't know about this; how can I generate machine code? I was talking about
> a Windows application here.

See http://www.pobox.com/~skeet/csharp/faq/#framework.required

I can't say I'd recommend going that route though - while I haven't
used the products in question, the .NET framework will clearly have
gone through a lot more testing (especially if you include the
"testing" which all of us are doing every time we run some .NET code)
than the linkers. I'd certainly recommend that if you take that route,
you do it early on and do as much of your development and testing using
the product as possible, largely ignoring the normal framework. That
may well end up costing a lot in terms of ease of development, of
course... 

-- 
Jon Skeet - <skeet@pobox.com>
http://www.pobox.com/~skeet
If replying to the group, please do not mail me too

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