Protecting MAUI Apps

You can integrate Dotfuscator Professional into your MAUI projects. Once integrated into a project, Dotfuscator will automatically protect the project whenever you build it in Visual Studio, MSBuild, or another build system which supports MAUI. Integrating Dotfuscator in this way creates an app with a proven, layered protection strategy, no matter what device it's running on.

Dotfuscator Professional's build integration for MAUI uses the same approach used by other .NET platforms. However, there are some unique aspects to the MAUI integration that you should understand before you begin.

Supported Project Types

You can integrate Dotfuscator Professional into MAUI projects that produce apps for the following platforms:

Android
iOS
WinUI 3
Mac
Tizen

If you are developing a cross-platform MAUI app, Dotfuscator sometimes needs to have unique configuration settings for each platform (e.g. Root Checks and Tamper Checks exclusive to Android, or a renaming exclusion that is only necessary on iOS).

When Dotfuscator protects your projects, it will also automatically protect all assemblies packaged as part of that project. You do not need to integrate Dotfuscator into library projects, such as NET Standard Libraries or Portable Class Libraries (PCLs), that are used by the output projects, because those libraries are automatically protected when packaged. For more information, see Choosing Which Projects to Protect.

For each project you integrate Dotfuscator into, you also need to decide what build configurations you want the protection applied to. The default configuration provided in the instructions will protect Release, Ad-Hoc, and AppStore configurations. The Ad-Hoc and AppStore configurations are only used by iOS projects. For more information, see Choosing Which Configurations to Protect.

Supported Build Environments

Dotfuscator Professional's build integration can run as part of builds on both Windows and macOS build machines. Cloud-based build services can also support Dotfuscator if they use these operating systems for their build agents. Examples include Azure DevOps Pipelines and Visual Studio App Center.

Dotfuscator must be installed and provisioned on each machine where the integrated project is built. (When building an iOS app using a Windows machine connected to a macOS machine over SSH, install Dotfuscator on the Windows machine.) For details, see Build Agents.

Note: Only the components included in the privately-distributed Dotfuscator NuGet package are compatible with macOS. This includes the MSBuild integration and the command line interface for .NET Core, but does not include the Config Editor. Once Dotfuscator is integrated into a project, you can customize and enhance protection by editing the Dotfuscator config file, either with a text editor on macOS or by building the project on Windows and using the Config Editor there.

Integration Instructions

To get started, follow the instructions on the Protect Your App page for integrating Dotfuscator into your MAUI project. By default, Dotfuscator will use a single configuration file for all targets. To use individual build configurations, please refer to the Target Platform Specific Configuration guide.