My Search for an Obfuscator is Complete

Well, I am pleased to announce I finally have an obfuscator fully working in my automated build environment.

After an initial inquiry to my readers about suggestions for a good obfuscator, and then a wasted day trying to actually buy one, I finally purchased XenoCode... and now am able to do an end to end build with one command.

XenoCode surprised me. I originally didn't give it much thought as I didn't hear much about the product, and it was a LOT cheaper than the competitors. After doing a complete test, I can honestly say that it is a compelling offering, with the best cost to feature ratio in any of the products I have investigated. I am extremely happy that I didn't spend $1,500 on DotFuscator when I could pick up XenoCode for $199... with pretty much the same set of features I needed.

Customer support was awesome. Every email I sent over 3 days was responded (on average) within an hour with a complete and clear answer. They were the first company to do that with me; that made a big difference during testing and product analysis. Other companies like PreEmptive and Wise Owl failed miserably here.

Now XenoCode isn't perfect. I am not happy with the fact that its 'dead code elimination' functionality has no way to statistically log what code was removed, but I can live with that for now. Another concern was the fact I had to modify my automated build environment to take care of the fact that I need a secondary directory for the obfuscated output; I would have preferred that it overwrite the assemblies once obfuscated.

All in all I am satisfied with my purchasing decision. If you are looking for an obfuscator for .NET, consider checking out XenoCode. You might be pleasantly surprised.