Windows Phone 7 developers – Obfuscate your app or have your source code stolen | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone 7 developers – Obfuscate your app or have your source code stolen

winrumors.com

8 pointsronnier11 comments

I completely fail to understand what the complaint is here.

It looks like users can download the application packages separately from the WP7 magic install marketplace app. OK. Once you download the package, since WP7 makes you write in .NET, anyone can just look at your executable and get the MSIL back out of it, and decompile to C# or whatever.

So...what? This has been true for every C# application written since .NET existed, on every platform. Welcome to the world of bytecode. What is Microsoft supposed to do to magically change this on Windows Phone? Even if they encrypted everything all the way down from the marketplace, as soon as someone roots the phone, they could just look at the executable on disk, right?

Why is bytecode obfuscation no longer an OK solution?

What am I missing here? I don't know anything about WP7.

EDIT: After looking around, I don't think I'm missing anything, I think it's just FUD. However, it looks like there's a different actual issue, which is that you can go download any app from the feed right now for free.

If by decompiling you mean turning machine-language (or bytecode) into equivalent human-readable source, it's also possible to do it in C.

The "fidelity" is typically much higher with .NET assemblies, because of the type metadata. (Still a silly article, though.)

Don't .NET assemblies also encode name metadata, making the transformation from source to assembly mostly reversible?

Yes.

Yeah, but like contextfree mentions, there's enough metadata in MSIL to basically reconstruct flawless C# out of your executable, so it's a somewhat different degree of problem.

isn't open code one of the reasons the web became the greatest achievement in history?

Indeed -- and the problem doesn't sound any worse than it is for (say) .NET or Java desktop apps.

Complainers will always complain.

Imagine how nasty would it be when someone decompiles their code and discover lots of, say, GPL code in there...

Is there a lot of GPL'ed C# code out there?

plenty of it, f-spot and banshee being 2 of the most popular. Most of them use Qt# or Gtk#

I bet a lot of it will find its way into proprietary closed-source applications on the WinMo 7 platform...

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