What is wrong with Mircosoft providing an obfuscation (or better) tool for Windows XNA games? 

Zenfar:

What is wrong with Mircosoft providing an obfuscation (or better) tool for Windows XNA games?

Why does Microsoft have to provide that tool? There are plenty of them out there. Just Google Bing it and I'm sure you'll find some useful products.

What are you guys doing that is so groundbreaking?

Microsoft's tools are high quality, low price, and I trust them :)

What is wrong with Mircosoft providing an obfuscation (or better) tool for Windows XNA games? 

Microsoft has a limited amount of manpower to put onto any one project. If they had additional manpower, I'd much rather see it put onto things like a faster compact JIT, or the ability to stream runtime-generated sound -- things that actually change what you can do. After all, most of the MS people know that obfuscation doesn't really work, too, so they're probably reluctant to spend any time on something that doesn't actually add much value.

How about a C# to native compiler?  That would be cool.  So would an Indie Games Marketplace on the PC for that matter.  If you are going to dream, dream big I say :)

As far as limited manpower you can always just buy a 3rd party solution and offer that.  I remember them doing that with a company that had web access for Team Suite, it was really cool one day I was evaluating the tool and then the next day I checked on it, they had been bought by Microsoft and the tool was available to MSDN subscribers, very cool.

Cheers.

Zenfar:

As far as limited manpower you can always just buy a 3rd party solution and offer that.

Or you could just buy a 3rd party solution and use it.

Geez!

The 3rd party solutions available were not made with XNA in mind.  Still for complete protection a Windows Marketplace with built in support and protection of XNA games would be the best solution.

PinoEire:

About obfuscation I found around different threads giving incomplete or wrong advice, so I think can be useful to share this. For commercial grade .NET software I'm successfully using Eazfuscator.NET, which is free and very efficient. The new Beta version has full support for XNA Game Studio 3.1.

Thank you for sharing this information. Despite all the arguments for obfuscating/not obfuscating, I have had trouble getting obfuscated XNA games to run properly, so this is a time saver.

DiSSo:

Thank you for sharing this information. Despite all the arguments for obfuscating/not obfuscating, I have had trouble getting obfuscated XNA games to run properly, so this is a time saver.

You're welcome ;)

Cheers,
Pino

Is Eazfuscator the only one that supports XNA 3.1?

Zenfar:

Is Eazfuscator the only one that supports XNA 3.1?

In my knowledge yes, but honestly I haven't checked the others as they are all commercial and quite dear ;)

Cheers,
Pino

Always be sure to test your program post-obfuscation. There came a point for my project where running Eazfuscator would cause the resultant executable to crash on startup.

Pfhoenix:

Always be sure to test your program post-obfuscation. There came a point for my project where running Eazfuscator would cause the resultant executable to crash on startup.

That's a first for me, I never had any problem with it: be sure to post the problem on the forum  so it will be checked and fixed.

Cheers,
Pino