Should you obfuscate a commercial .Net application?

Question

I was thinking about obfuscating a commercial .Net application. But is it really worth the effort to select, buy and use such a tool? Are the obfuscated binaries really safe

Answer 1

The fact that you actually can reverse engineer it does not make obfuscation useless. It does raise the bar significantly.

An unobfuscated .NET assembly will show you all the source, highlighted and all just by downloading the .NET Reflector. Add obfuscation to that and you'll reduce very significatively the amount of people who'll be able to modify the code.

It depends on you are you protecting yourself from. If you'll ship it unobfuscated, you might as well open source the application and benefit from marketing. Shipping it obfuscated will only allow people to relatively easily generate modified binaries through patches instead of being able to steal your code and create a direct competitor. Getting the actual source from obfuscated code is very hard, depending on the obfuscator, of course.