Obfuscation for .NET

Update (1 November 2012):
I recently tried upgrading to the latest Smart Assembly version (now owned by Red Gate) while in the process of upgrading my project to .NET Framework 4.5. The latest Smart Assembly version seemed to work okay at first, but then I discovered a bug that caused it to crash. I sent a bug report to Red Gate, along with a repro, then waited and bugged them until I finally received a reply that said: "I'm hopeful that a release may be available with a couple of weeks, however there's no full time development team currently working on Smartassembly; the majority are deployed on other tools." This was especially infuriating since I had purchased "1 year Support & Upgrades". What kind of support is this? None at all, I think. My conclusion is that development on Smart Assembly is stagnant. Therefore, it's best to consider the product dead.

Original Post:
I recently had to fulfill my need for an obfuscation utility for .NET. More specifically, I needed a solution that works with WPF. I learned that WPF poses a particular challenge concerning obfuscation, since the BAML format has not been made public by Microsoft.

My first attempt was using Dotfuscator Community Edition which comes bundled with Visual Studio. After spending a significant amount of time picking certain properties and methods to exclude, I still couldn't get the obfuscated version of my app to run. So I finally gave up and instead turned to Google to help me find an alternative tool.

The only tool I found, with specific mention of WPF support, was {smartassembly}. As long as I exclude those types and (attached) properties used in XAML, this tool works like a charm.

{smartassembly} projects are stored in an XML format, so you can edit them using either your favorite text editor or {smartassembly}'s designated user-interface. The UI follows a rather interesting concept. It's a gigantic vertically scrollable area, consisting of a collapsible pane for each settings group. It reminds me a lot of a word-processor. This may seem strange at first, but after a couple hours of usage, you'll likely see the design concept's merit points.

{smartassembly} has security and optimization features in addition to simple obfuscation. One of particular interest is error reporting. When your program crashes, error reports can be collected by a server and made available for your viewing. That feature, however, is only available in the Professional and Enterprise editions. The Standard edition will run you 500 USD, and the other editions move up from there. For more information, see the {smartassembly} website.