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Quote: replacement for our current .net obfuscator due to it being hard to use
Sorry, that makes me chuckle. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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For obfuscators I recommend DeepSea[^]. The price is good, the quality of obfuscation is quite excellent and their support is top notch, to boot.
Don't get me started on RedGate. I lost a lot of respect when they took Reflector and turned it into a failure. Turning it into something rotten was one thing; charging for it was another.
You mentioned ILSpy. Have you looked at JetBrains DotPeek? It's free and complete. I found ILSpy a bit lacking in some respects. It's still an excellent tool but being open source (?) I don't think it's moved on very much. JetBrains[^] decompiler is a polished product.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Funny enough, DeepSea seems to have just recently gone dead. There's a note up on the homepage that says there will be no future releases, and the current version is now unsupported freeware.
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That is really surprising and unexpected. I last dealt with them about 18 months ago when it cost roughly £250 for a licence. I recall they had a couple of blokes running it and they couldn't do enough to help me. It's a pity; they really had a passion for the product but like all of us with bills to pay and food to buy, perhaps there wasn't enough money coming in to make it viable. Still, the price now is even better.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Sure, the price is fine, but I doubt many serious developers are going to want to rely on an unsupported abandonware obfuscator. That really is a shame, though, it looks like it was a good product.
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Aside from the Reflector fiasco I don't recall any other bad press about redgate; and I'm generally not the sort to write a company off for a single act of bad judgment.
I haven't tried jetbrain's reflector; I stuck with ILSpy since it wouldn't require my learning a new tool because the owner suffered a case of misplaced greed.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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They make good database products. I use their freeware SQL Search add-in in SSMS quite a bit.
They were condemned by a lot of people for charging for Reflector. The original Lutz Roeder version was changed at some point to go online where RedGate deactivated the original free version. They hoped it would coerce us into paying for it. I did. Within an hour or two I had endless crashes with it. To be fair, they did refund me the next day but I'd rather have paid for a stable product than plead for my money back for a duff one.
Reflector was RedGate's "Vista" moment. I hope they've learned their lesson. They say you have one attempt to make a first impression and to me, RedGate didn't. They did, but for the wrong reason.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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SeptimusHedgehog 151576 wrote: Don't get me started on RedGate. I lost a lot of respect when they took Reflector and turned it into a failure. Turning it into something rotten was one thing; charging for it was another.
SeptimusHedgehog 151576 wrote: Have you looked at JetBrains DotPeek? It's free and complete.
CPallini wrote: You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him.
:Smile:
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SeptimusHedgehog 151576 wrote: the quality of obfuscation is quite excellent
How did you verify that?
When I'm looking at a third-party project without sources, I tend to use the assemblies the way they are. One doesn't need to deobfuscate them merely to use them.
Curious, what is the ROI from that obfuscation-effort?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: When I'm looking at a third-party project without sources, I tend to use the assemblies the way they are. One doesn't need to deobfuscate them merely to use them.
Would those be libraries with a public API that just don't want you to see how they're implemented? In my case it's a full application being delivered that we want to make reverse engineering as painful as possible. When there's no API, and non-serialized (or etc) classes just look like class1.method1(), figuring out how to use parts of the whole isn't going to be easy.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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At a previous position, I used {SmartAssembly} for about 4 years. We used it in our build engine with NAnt. The command line was very easy to use along with the interface. It can get tricky if you use reflection, but its pretty easy to add exceptions. I used it before it became a RedGate tool, but I would give it a thumbs up!
Hogan
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whos developer's support email having turned into a black hole?
I'm about to drop a bunch on a certain companies product but am nervous about their support.
Could you provide initials or pm me so as to keep me from making a mistake?
Thanks.
:Ron
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company RS, product S. Since there're multiple RS -S tools, for addtional disambiguation the website has flyout menu's that only work in IE, and contact info includes a university alumni email address in addition to RS email addresses.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Obfuscators are easy to work around. De4dot, for example, is free, opensource, and will deobfuscate all the obfuscators mentioned here (along with many others). If someone has enough skill to do something with the original code, they probably have enough skill to use a deobfuscator.
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I, my boss, and the customer the app is for are all aware that obfuscation is breakable. What they want is to make reverse engineering non-trivial, and want the difficulty to be closer to disassembling a native binary (what we'd've used if the paranoia requirement had came at the start instead of several years into the project) than pressing an easy button. The output of SmartAgent and de4dot as viewed in ILSpy or dotPeak is still vile enough to not be human intelligible without a lot of work. Reverse engineering the algorithms by feeding hundreds of test datasets to see what comes out would probably be less painful; and that's as much as we can hope for since the software is going on ordinary PCs not heavily tamper hardened boxes (and even there only a small number of wipe at first sign of trouble boxes would be likely to stop a sufficiently skilled adversary).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I've been using Reg-Gates database tools for years and recommend them highly, I have no experience with their other tools but I do believe their core skills are database.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I've used SmartAssembly and Eazfuscator[^], and I've found both to do the job nicely.
One of the bonuses of using SmartAssembly is that it also does some extra non-obfuscation related things, like pruning unused classes, error reporting, and lots of other extras.
Eazfuscator does't provide that facility, and does provide features I could not get to work property in SmartAssembly, like fine grained control on name mangling.
I went with Eazfuscator in the end because it did everything I needed at a reduced price.
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Roy Hodgson has picked his team for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
He has gone with Germany.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur .
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So true. Apparently he was considering Germany & the Indian nation football team. I am still wondering why he choose Germany over India, any clues?
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He doesn't have that many frequent flyer miles. Now, if you were to up and move India somewhere closer like, say France, he'd be well up for it.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: He doesn't have that many frequent flyer miles.
I'm sure Julia Bradbury could help him there.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Is it normal for developers to have to work on noisy office spaces? I've had a few different jobs as a developer over the past few years. The best one had an office. It was quiet and it was easy to focus on my work. I've had others with semi-queiet cubicles and one with a very noisy environment with people talking on their cell phones while walking around the developers' desks. How am I supposed to concentrate on work when the employer seems to discourage it by the environment?
Please tell me that this isn't normal. Are there employers out there that actually encourage productivity? How do I find these jobs? Lately I seem to be having bad luck. Maybe I live in the wrong part of the US?
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we have to separate parts in our office. One for the QA and support team and the other for developers. The people from the QA call our rooms the 'monastery'...
I never see normal development places that where noisy. It seems to me too much...
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is (V).
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I used to work in a noisy work environment: nobody talks - they just chat all day on IRC!!! I don't understand how people can face each other and not talk normally. Why do they have to go through IRC?
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I currently have three people engaged in a semi-shouted Facetime conversation just over the partition wall. I might as well sit back and relax until they have stopped because of all the distraction it causes... 
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