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This week, our favorite resource(s) from our Resources and Downloads directories are Dingo UML Modeler, an open-source UML modeling tool based on the JavaBeans Component Architecture, and Demeanor for .NET, an assembly obfuscator designed to secure your .NET applications.
According to its creator, the Dingo UML Modeler, a GPL project still under development, is divided into separate modules: a Data Beans Library, a 2D Sprite Library, a Visual Beans Library, and the main application, which hooks the components together. The Data Beans Library handles all UML-specific data processing. The 2D Sprite Library defines a base collection of generic sprite behavior. The Visual Beans Library is a collection of visual JavaBeans that appear inside various UML diagrams.
The Dingo project is a work in progress, but it has a worthy goal in mind for professionals working on complex software systems. They have extended an invitation to Java developers who would like to collaborate on the project. So check them out. You may want to get in on the action.
Although Demeanor for .NET is still in beta (for the next few days) it fills an immediate need: obfuscating your .NET applications. According to maker Wise Owl Software, Demeanor “protects your intellectual property by making it extremely difficult to reverse engineer.”
“Besides symbol name obfuscation, Demeanor also mangles the control-flow of your program to defeat the best decompiler products,” the company notes. From the command-line you can selectively obfuscate as many class, method, field, property, delegate and event names as you deem desirable. In addition, it removes unnecessary information from a .NET assembly for faster download of assemblies. Demeanor “purposely chooses names that are legal to the CLR [Common Language Runtime] but illegal in C# and VB.NET further increasing the reverse engineering difficulty,” says its maker.
Wise Owl’s Brent Rector will be speaking at the VSLive 2002 conference in San Francisco on February 13, 2002, where he will demo Demeanor for .NET. So tune in and tune up.
If you’ve got a cool resource or download in the field of software development you’d like to share with the world, visit our user submission pages and fill out the simple forms. We’ll review them, and post them quickly to our directories. Plus, once a week, we’ll pick a particularly useful resource and highlight it for all our readers to enjoy.
