Security and intellectual property protection (for programs) are
usually deemed to be somewhat different beasts in computing. Reading
your first couple of lines, I thought you meant there were lots of
security holes within the .NET framework for crackers to attack.

See http://pobox.com/~skeet/csharp/obfuscation.html for my views on the
matter.

There's obuscation tools that make it harder to do what you're talking  
about.  However, even with them, if someone wants to reverse engineer your  
code, they can.  More importantly, even if you compile your code straight  
to machine code, it is not secure.  It may take a little more work, but it  
is possible to reverse compiled machine code and there are even tools  
available to help someone do that.  Even with optimizations, one can  
reverse the process of compilation and get back to something reasonably  
usable.

Basically, if you write software and you let anyone else use it, then  
anyone using it has the ability to get back to your original algorithms  
and design.  It may be slightly easier with .NET applications, but no  
software is immune and it really just comes down to how valuable your code  
is.  If your code is particularly useful, no amount of protection will  
prevent it from eventually being reverse engineered.  Conversely, if your  
code isn't unique or difficult to reproduce, you could publish the  
original source code and still not have to worry too much about other  
people using it.

In other words, whether your code gets reused (whether with your  
permission or not) has more to do with how useful the code is than whether  
you've obfuscated it somehow.

Pete

This is what the framework actually is.  What you want to do is
obfuscate your code.  If you do a search on google for ".NET obfuscate" you
will turn up a number of products that will help you.

   Hope this helps.

Would code be safer for a WebApp?
I mean, the code would run on only 1 machine,
instead of being distributed to the public.
Roger