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

At the very least, you should obfuscate your dlls to prevent hackers & competitors from viewing and making sense of your code. Obfuscation is not 100% foolproof, but it presents a big enough obstacle in their path.

Some obfuscators such as Crypto Obfuscator have a feature of embedding all dlls in the main exe so your dlls are not explicitly visible and available on disk to open in reverse-engineering tools such as Reflector.