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jellevanurk_Salland's avatar
jellevanurk_Salland
Copper Contributor
Jan 16, 2024

Obfuscation and MSIX installers using WAPP

Dear community,   To keep up to date with the market, we are moving our installers to MSIX installers instead of MSI installers.   We however noticed that our postbuild events that obfuscate code...
Dami178's avatar
Dami178
Copper Contributor
Jan 20, 2024

Hello jellevanurk_Salland ,

 

I had the same problem and I thought that it was a bug but I don't think so. Here what I'have done (1) and what I did to solve the problem. (2)

 

1) I was running the postbuild (containing the dotreactor cmd) on the installerProject (the wapproj) and I was produicing ofuscating the dlls on MyAppInstaller\bin\x86\Release\MyApp

 

(Remarks: the dlls are well ofuscated, but wapproj does'nt seem to get the dlls from here).

 

2) Instead, I migrated the postbuild from the wapproj to the csproj of my app and I generated it on :

output/ and the output/msixbundle. (remark: I had to do some adaptation to match the path ofc).

 

By doing so, when I install the app through the installer and I check the dlls inside the WindowsApp/yourProject, the dll are in fact now really obfuscated.

 

Have a great day. 🙂

 

 

  • jellevanurk_Salland's avatar
    jellevanurk_Salland
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 22, 2024
    Hey Dami178 ,

    do I understand correctly the following:
    "Instead of postbuild obfuscating the installer, you postbuild all the projects that are used"?

    If that is the case, let me explain our siutation a little more.

    We have several projects for several layers in our WPF application.
    ProjectX.Application --> ProjectX.Application\bin\x64\Release\net6.0\win-x64
    ProjectX.Core --> ProjectX.Core\bin\x64\Release\net6.0\win-x64
    ProjectX.Common --> ProjectX.Common\bin\x64\Release\net6.0\win-x64
    ProjectX.GUI <- entry project --> ProjectX.GUI\bin\x64\Release\net6.0-windows\win-x64
    ProjectX.Installer --> ProjectX.Installer\bin\x64\Release\ProjectX.Gui

    If I understood correctly you would add a separate postbuild event to each of them and that should fix it according to you?

    Kind regards,

    Jelle
    • Dami178's avatar
      Dami178
      Copper Contributor
      Jan 23, 2024

      jellevanurk_Salland 

       

      1) Yes I've migrated the postbuild to the project which contains all the app source code.

      2) I think that yes in this case, you will have to create several postbuilds one for each project.

       

      Don't hesitate to install and check inside the C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\YourApp to verify that the dlls are in fact obfuscated.

       

      Best regards,

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