“An obfuscator only delays the inevitable. With unlimited resources (time and money) and physical access to code, all code can be reverse engineered. This was true for native x86 binaries and it’s true for .NET Framework applications. What an obfuscator does is increase the cost of the effort required to reverse engineer obfuscated code. Hopefully, it increases the cost enough to make reverse engineering your code unpractical.”

“It’s easy to put Visual Build Pro to work doing all that manual labor for you so you can focus on more important things. Visual Build Pro is a powerful but affordable build management solution that will automate the build process without a huge commitment of time, and it works with the tools you’re using today.”

Eric Eric Friedman has submitted code to support namespaces and uninstall. The former fills the biggest hole in XsdClassesGen (thanks Eric), but why would anyone need the latter?!? : )

XsdClassesGen is a Custom Tool Add-In to VS.NET 2002 & 2003 to generate type-safe wrapper classes for serializing to and from XML documents. It takes as input an XSD and produces the C# or VB.NET code to do the serialization using the XmlSerializer. This is really just the output of running xsd.exe /classes, but integrated directly into VS.NET.

If you’d like to know more about what a custom tool is and how to build your own, check out CollectionGen.

Also, Atif Aziz used some of my custom tool code and built a generic VS.NET code generator shim that allows you to build a code generator that plugs into VS.NET by implementing a single method.

And, as if that weren’t enough, Stephane Tombeur has posted the code to VS2005. Thanks, Stephane!

From Razvan Caciula: I like Chris Sells's books, but also i like romanians too :> I'm preparing for a technical interview and i founded this book very useful.

We've released the v0.1 version of Genghis. Enjoy!

Genghis is a set of extensions built on top of .NET and integrated with WinForms to provide application-level services in the same flavor as the Microsoft Foundation Classes. Genghis gets its name as the functional heir to Attila, a similar set of functionality built on top of ATL.

Are you building and deploying .NET applications in a secure environment, e.g. over the intranet or the internet? If so, they you’ve probably mourned the loss of the binary and SOAP formatters that can automatically serialize a graph of objects that are marked as [Serializable] and that may also implement ISerializable and IDeserializationCallback. Both of these formatters are dependent on reflection, which will not be available in a more restrictive security environment. Likewise, even ISerialization.GetObjectData is verboten if you wanted to do this kind of thing yourself. As far as that goes, [Serializable] and ISerialization should be forbidden in a secure environment, as it allows a client to get and set the private variables of an object, potentially causing harm.

Still, security is the enemy of usability, to paraphrase Keith Brown. So, in the spirit of a balancing the design need for objects that can serialize themselves with the goal of complete disclosure in a secure world, I’ve built my own “safe” formatter. It only uses facilities of the runtime that work in the most secure environment of the default settings for the internet zone. So that objects can guard themselves against malicious data, I define a new interface called ISafelySerializeable that they need to implement to support this serialization facility. The protocol is exactly the same as ISerializable, so if that interface is already being implemented, the implementation of GetObjectData can be shared between both interfaces.

Currently, the code is in alpha and is riddled with TODO statements, but its functional enough today for actual usage. My SafeFormatter and test harness are available for your feedback. Enjoy.