Prior to releasing your software written in .NET internationally it is highly recommended to consider the protection of its IP and code from any kind of malicious attacks or reverse-engineering. The SmartAssembly tool will help to carry out this task in the following several methods. The obfuscation method is a code protection technique, based on the principle of making the code purposefully hard to read. It turns all the names of methods and classes into meaningless or unreadable characters, difficult for understanding. The string encoding method encodes strings to protect them. With all strings of managed software being stored in one place and in a rather palpable structure, even after obfuscation it is not impossible to understand the purpose of the coding by following the references to your strings. The latter can reveal vital information like serial numbers or SQL requests, login information and passwords. Parts of your codes may be accessible and possible for other people to understand if they follow your external calls (like those to a message box), even with control flow obfuscation and string encoding methods applied. The unique protection feature of Reference Dynamic Proxy, offered by SmartAssembly, allows to hide the greater part of such calls to properties, fields or external methods by changing them into calls to the proxy. This method of protection makes finding trial expiry dialog-like calls (which quite accidentally can offer clues as to where it is best to break in) pretty complicated. The pruning feature will automatically scan your software for such non-useful metadata as names of events, method parameters and properties – codes, not likely to be executed at runtime - and remove them so that they wouldn’t give anyone clues on particular methods and types you use. The reduction of the assembly’s size by resource compression and encryption feature will make the code harder to discern. Dependency Merging, though not being a protection feature as such, allows to choose particular DLLs and merge them into a single executable one, making the dependency indivisible from the main assembly. From this operation your performance will benefit in a way that you won’t have to load multiple DLLs files. With this feature allowing for one assembly it is easier to disguise and reduce your code.