How to change the assemblyIdentity of an executable

Posted by David on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by David
Published on 2010-06-12T10:48:12Z Indexed on 2010/06/12 11:43 UTC
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Filed under:

assembly

|

obfuscation

|

disassembly

|

executable-format

I want to hide the tool I used to create an .exe file. I am not doing anything illegal, I just want to protect my intellectual property from being copied. If I open the exe file in a text editor I see the following section.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
<assemblyIdentity
    version="XXX.XX"
    processorArchitecture="X86"
    name="Microsoft.Windows.NameOfTheTool"
    type="win32"
/>
</assembly>

I have attempted to change the name to:
name="Microsoft.Windows.SomeOtherName"

This resulted in the following message when I attempted to execute the file. "This application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect."

How can I solve this?

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