Practices for hiding the executable code of compiled applications

Question

It\'s a standard practice to decompile and reverse engineer .net assemblies.

I\'d like to release some plugin assemblies that will add to existing applications, but

Answer 1

It's theoretically impossible to achieve 100% protection unless you control the target hardware. If the CPU is able to execute it, given enough time and knowledge, a human being can read it too. This is not even limited to C# (although it's usually easier to do in managed languages). You can use an obfuscator like Dotfuscator or XenoCode to make it harder to understand the decompiled code. If you're really concerned, you should move to a server-based application.