Guarding Against Software Piracy, Source Code Theft and Tampering

In addition, applications developed using managed frameworks like Microsoft .NET significantly raise the risk of piracy, tampering, and code theft threats as well as increasing the complexity of protecting applications at runtime. Unlike native Windows applications, Microsoft .NET applications are only partially compiled into an Intermediate Language (IL) and contain highly descriptive metadata. This fact means that the deployed code itself can be decompiled into a higher representation source code. Because the framework is a standards-based implementation, there are a multitude of freeware tools available that can decompile.NET code. This greatly reduces the skill level required of a hacker or competitor to tamper and steal the code.