Hiding my code in VB 2008?

Question

When I publish a program on VB 2008, I don't want people who download my program to look at its code.  Any way I can lock the code?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is no way you can hide the code as it is the base of .net framework that the code will be converted to IL and people can use Applications like Reflectors to retrieve it. But you can use obfuscator to rename the variables and methods to meaningless names so that if one use a reflector he will get weird variable, class, member and method names. and the could would be very hard to read. 

---

--------------------------------------------------------

Surender Singh Bhadauria

My Blog

 

Answer 2

The Visual Basic code, as you wrote it, is not visible. As was mentioned by Surender Singh Bhadauria your code is pre-compiled to an intermediate language (IL). However, VB or C# code can be generated from disassembled IL.

If you Google/Bing for ".NET obfuscators" you will find plenty of options to help protect your code.

---

Paul ~~~~ Microsoft MVP (Visual Basic)