New problems have come along with the complete overhaul of the way .NET applications are deployed. One of these is a need for what is called obfuscation. Obfuscation is generally taken to mean protecting your program code from being read and copied by others - generally for the purpose of stealing the hard work you put into your program! It's important today because computer programs written in newer languages like VB.NET are easy to understand even after compilation. (Older languages are compiled into optimized machine code so they're very difficult to turn into human readable form without a lot of effort.)

Dotfuscator from PreEmptive Solution is the obfuscator that you're most likely to see. The reason is that Microsoft has concluded a marketing agreement with PreEmptive to bundle a "light" version of Dotfuscator in full versions of Visual Studio. (A "PreEmptive" marketing coup!) The "Community Edition" will obfuscate code inside Visual Studio ... but not much else. When you consider that they want $1500 for the "Professional" edition .. even this "light" version is a real bonus.

Salamander from Remotesoft offers the .NET obfuscator. This is an obfuscator that offers a number of technically advanced features in a relatively straightforward utility approach. And their price is more attractive too starting at $800 for up to five developers.

9Rays.Net offers a platform which allows a variety of tools to be installed as "plug in" modules and one of them is a .NET based obfuscator. The complete package is called Spices.NET and includes:

• Spices.Obfuscator
• Spices.Decompiler
• Spices.Modeler
• Spices.Investigator
• Spices.Informer

This approach could provide the most convenience due to the full integration with Visual Studio .NET. The price is pretty convenient - compared to the competion anyway - with the Spices.Obfuscator module listing at slightly less than $200 for the version integrated into VS.NET.