My first encounter with SmartAssembly
- by Peter Larsson
Let me start by writing I am a supreme VB6 programmer, but I have very little experience with VB.Net, so I think I still need some more time learning SmartAssembly.
SmartAssembly make obfuscating and merging dll files a piece of cake! With it's simple, straight forward and clean GUI I did make my tests work. With other obfuscators like Xenocode, Salamander etc which lets you (and in some cases forces you) control more advanced settings, you really have to know what you are doing.
Especially when it comes to protecting code that uses external dependencies.
My most annoying experience is that if you start checking radio buttons and activating different obfuscating features in SmartAssembly, you will end up breaking your working code as well, if you like me is not that experienced and don't know what you’re doing.
SmartAssembly have some troubleshooting information on their website which explains why the application will fail in some scenarios. So why not extend these checks in some deeper analyzing stage on the dll's?
By doing that I think more people could get fully functional dll's out of the box instead of trying different settings and then test the protected dll and see if it's working or not.
//Peter
