Is .NET code obfuscation really worth it?

Question

From what I\'ve read, code obfuscation isn\'t really that hard to \"crack\", and it will only delay the inevitable. In that case, what is it\'s purpose?

If someone re

Answer 1

Only if your project is a long-running and would take someone a great deal of time to implement is it worth it. This is of course an opinion here, but I haven't found an obfuscated .Net DLL yet that I couldn't figure out what's going on using only Reflector.

It's a deterrent, nothing more. If the cost of someone reverse engineering your code is greater than the cost of implementing it themselves, that's the only legitimate case I see for it, but if someone wants to see how your code ticks, it's not very good at preventing that.

One common case I see a lot is how you produce and/or decrypt a license key. Anyone that's motivated to figure this out and dig in reflector for you salt/decryption methods isn't going to be stopped by obfuscation, I'd dare to say it won't really slow them down much either.