Hi,

As I understand it, basic obfuscation simply involves changing (encrypting
maybe?) most of the variable/method names stored in your assembly. I don't
think there are any performance problems with it as I don't think any actual
code is being changed.

A google search will almost certainly throw up a wealth of information.

-- Pete

Basically,  Obfuscation takes your variable and function names, and shortens
them to something harder to understand.  It keeps people from taking your
EXE's and assemblies and deompliing them into human readable source code.

Example:
Public Sub GetCustomerList(nCustomerID as Int32)

That might get translated to something like
Public Sub A(X as int32)

If someone were to decompile your App, a function called A() that takes a
parameter called X that's an int32 doesn't tell you much.  I think since it
makes things a bit smaller, that makes your compiled code a bit smaller.

I doubt that you'll see any real performance gains.  It will be faster since
the DLL is smaller, but how much faster is "faster" will be hard to tell.

Michael

Hi Paul,

In general, I would suspect that code obfuscation isn't going to incur any
real performance penatly.  The best advice I can give you is to measure
before and after the obfuscation process, and see what the results are.  
Another thing you can look at is the IL ouput for the two binaries, using
ILDasm.exe from the SDK.

Thanks,
Bill Wert
CLR Performance Test Team
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microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.performance:5119