Introduction

No secret that the Microsoft .Net technology after a few years of development became widely known, and a wide circle of developers uses this technology for creating more powerful and up-to-date programs.

The 9Rays.Net company was familiar with .Net since first beta versions of this technology were issued, and has been developing a constantly enlarging set of tools for .Net developers named Spices.Net.

This wide set of actual, powerful, and universal tools is unexpendable for protecting, research, modeling, and analysis of .Net software.

9Rays.Net has announced a new version of Spices.Net:  the version 5.0, which will undoubtedly capture the hearts of wide audience of .Net developers and researchers.

What's new

New GUI

Spices.Net GUI was significantly reworked, and is now presenting three modern look'n'feel styles: Office2003, OfficeXp, and Visual Studio 2005 with docking and tabbed documents support.

Spices.Net developers improved usability, and now Spices.Net became much more convenient, understandable, and much faster.

The main 'bearing' element of Spices.Net interface is the use of the company product  FlyGrid.Net, very fast and flexible data grid, which significantly enlarged the Spices.Net productivity.

New concept - multitasking

In the new version of Spices.Net a new concept was used: tasks separation, with executing them in separate threads and specifying the priority of the executed tasks. This concept allows developer not to delay "for later" urgent tasks, but launch them and work on next ones, monitoring the execution process in TaskList.

The TaskList allows to manage started tasks - pause, continue the execution, or stop it, - and displays the current state of the executed tasks.

Imagine that you may launch the decompilation of a build, at the same time investigate the build architecture or obfuscate the project, and at the same time decompile the build.

Integration with VS2003 and VS2005

Spices.Net may now be integrated with both popular IDEs - MS Visual Studio 2003 and MS Visual Studio 2005. If two versions of Visual Studio are installed on your PC - no problem in using Spices.Net integration in both IDE.

Spices.Decompiler

Visual Decompiler is one of the key Spices.Net novelties. Now the user may build a code flow diagram enabling to analyze the code execution. 9Rays company is not going to stay where it is, and in the nearest future will expand the capabilities of Visual Decompiler, providing it with a wider set of diagrams for code analysis. In the new version there is also a capability of changing the names of variables, technology of obtaining context information was improved, the execution of decompilation tasks became manageable: the user may now assign priorities to decompilation tasks, executing several tasks at the same time. Now it is also possible to execute decompilation tasks with the help of automation.

Spices.Localizer

This is a new Spices.Net tool allowing to extract the localized information from .Net builds (from code and resources), and create localization tables that may be used in Spices.Obfuscator for localizing applications. Unlike other products, Spices.Localizer offers total extraction of localized information - from code and resources, besides you may always synchronize tables with the latest version of your program for extracting new lines and creating localized versions for them.

In the future the company is planning to add a preview feature allowing to view the application resources in localized form.

Spices.Obfuscator

Spices.Obfuscator 5.0 offers a significantly enlarged set of protection tools and services acknowledging that Spices.Obfuscator provides total and uncompromising protection of your products.

Let us consider the key tools and services:

New object - Spices.Solution

This is a new object allowing to load in Spices.Net a collection of Spices.Project objects. It is known that programs are often issued in different configurations and packages. Spices.Solution allows to create various configurations and packages of your programs, and obfuscate them at a time.

Obfuscation Events

ObfuscationEvents allows to include execution of different operations in the course of an obfuscation process; the wide set of ObfuscationEvents enables to include in the obfuscation process such tasks as preparation of builds, deployment, writing up or generating necessary files, as well as packaging obfuscated builds.

ObfuscationEvents are supported both in Spices.Project and in Spices.Solution.

Localization

Spices.Net includes a new module Spices.Localizer mentioned above.

The documents created by Localizer may be used for localization of your applications.

You may just specify the doc file and localization language in LocalizationOptions of each Spices.Project build, so that the application would be localized in the course of obfuscation process.

CodeAnonymizer technology

This is a new and powerful technology allowing to transform a decompiler or disassembler program into wasted efforts, as the result of decompilation or disassembling will be just a listing of meaningless lines or non-working code.

Utilizing this technology is especially useful for builds with a large number of non-obfuscated members, because it allows to maximally disguise the code and make its decompilation/ disassembling unreadable. To learn more about this technology, read Spices.CodeAnonymizer technology overview...

Reinforced antiILDASM

Also 9Rays.Net did not forget about antiILDASM: now if one uses even minimal antiILDASM protection, the antiILDASM utility will crush in the very beginning of the process of disassembling of the protected build, i.e. no line from your build will be obtained.

String Encryption is reinforced by the CodeAnonymizer technology

StringEncryption technology will be also reinforced by CodeAnonymizer technology - now calls of string encryption methods are disguised to look like meaningless methods.

Automation

This novelty allows to use Spices.Net tools in different scripts for automation of tasks. Now the user may utilize decompilation and obfuscation of Spices.Net in his/her scripts or in C#/VB.Net applications.

Conclusion

As you see, 9Rays.Net company did not sit on its hands, and offered not only new version of its well-known and award winning product, but introduced a number of revolutionary solutions, innovations, and means, that nobody ever offered. These new means enable to call Spices.Net a powerful and unexpendable tool, which each developer and each researcher of .Net application must have at hand.