Microsoft's Deal With PreEmptive Marches On

PreEmptive's Dotfuscator Community Edition, a light version of the company's Professional Edition, has been shipping as an integrated component of Microsoft's .NET development tool and the previous edition, Visual Studio 2003, said Gabriel Torok, president of PreEmptive Solutions, Cleveland, OH. Dotfuscator protects the intellectual property of software developers writing to .NET via Visual Studio by obfuscating--or scrambling--protected source code.

"If you as a developer have intellectual property you are concerned about, and an application you're writing for .NET has content in it you want to protect, you use a tool like ours to scramble or encrypt the code as to make it a much more difficult process to get to that source code," explained Torok.

On course to hit the market without a name change, Visual Studio 2005 is currently in first beta, with a second beta expected later this year, said Nick Abbott, group manager in the .NET Developer Product Management Group at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash.

If necessary, developers can upgrade to Dotfuscator Professional Edition, which advanced features such as control-flow obfuscation, pruning, string encryption, enhanced overload induction and other features, said Torok.