C# - PC fingerprint (for program piracy protection)

[xheo]

Unfortunately that's not true. NGEN still requires the original meta data to be available which makes it easy to read and disassemble. And if the NGEN'd assembly is not valid for the given machine - say compiled on x86 machine and run on x64 - then the original assembly is used instead. There are other conditions where the original file is used in place of the NGEN assembly but I don't recall off hand. The only thing NGEN is good for is a potential increase in load time. It has 0 benefit to run time since the code is JITTed exactly once by the runtime and runs with the same performance characteristics as an NGEN assembly. While Microsoft warns that NGEN assembly use might prevent the JIT from taking advantage of advanced scheduling and instruction ordering for the specific machine, in practice the NGEN code and JIT code are generally the same.

The only way to protect your assembly from prying eyes and modification is to use an assembly encryption system.

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