Dotfuscator Comes to Visual Studio for Mac to Help Protect Apps
This is a guest blog by Bill Leach. Bill is CTO and co-founder of PreEmptive Solutions, makers of Dotfuscator, DashO, and JSDefender application protection tools.
Xamarin developers all over the world use Dotfuscator every day to protect their applications from reverse-engineering and hacking. By integrating Dotfuscator into their Xamarin builds, their applications get robust code obfuscation and runtime protections that help secure their valuable work. In past guest blog posts I have done a full overview of Dotfuscator and deep dive into Xamarin.Android protection, but today I have something new to share with Xamarin developers.
Until now, you have had to use Windows to run Dotfuscator to protect your apps, this is because Dotfuscator was a .NET Framework application with Windows-specific dependencies. Talking with the wonderful Xamarin community we saw a strong demand to offer the same experiences for developers building Xamarin apps with Visual Studio for Mac!
We have some great news for those developers! With the recent release of Dotfuscator Professional 6 Beta, we've migrated Dotfuscator to .NET Standard and .NET Core, so it now has cross-platform support for building under .NET Core and Mono, on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This opens up many more options for all Xamarin developers:
- The Dotfuscator 6 build engine runs on Mac, so you can protect your apps on your local workstation, using your preferred operating systems and build tools.
- Dotfuscator's MSBuild integration works with Visual Studio for Mac builds the same way as it does with Visual Studio builds, providing consistency across IDEs. You can see how that works for Xamarin in the Getting Started section of the Dotfuscator user guide.
- Dotfuscator's cloud build integration now works for Mac build hosts in AppCenter and Azure DevOps, so Xamarin cloud builds can run on the operating system of your choice. You can read more about that in our recent blog article: Building on a Mac with Dotfuscator 6 in Azure DevOps.
Dotfuscator Professional 6 is currently in beta, but has a go-live license and is fully supported for production use. We expect the final release to be in April 2020. To learn even more, read our announcement blog: Dotfuscator 6.0 Beta: Entering The Next Era Of Dotfuscator.
There is also good news ahead for Dotfuscator Community users, who may be wondering when all these great features will be available for them to try. You read it here first: we are planning a major update to Dotfuscator Community, which (among many other things) will include all the cross-platform and build integration support that is now in Dotfuscator Professional 6. Our goal is to make the Community and Professional user experiences exactly the same.
In the meantime, anyone can try Dotfuscator Professional 6 for free–you can get a fully-functional trial copy here. And of course we want to hear from you about what works and what doesn't work. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
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