How to debug an obfuscated and merged assemblies.

[rtom]

After a set of assemblies where merged and obfuscated, the program will no longer run. Is it possible to debug obfuscated code. I attached a debugger to it, but the call stack is mangled. Is there an easy way to find out what is wrong, and were in the code this is happening

Thanks

[slaphead99]

Yes, absoultely- this is what the "self-diagnosis" mode is all about. Its like the local version of the unhandled exception reporting feature (which works just as well too - except there is the "middle-man" of report transmission). So just apply the self-diagnosis feature.

[rtom]

I have a fairly large project that brings in a large number of 3rd party assemblies. After obfuscation, I get error messages with funny character strings. These are likely related to messages with substituted strings.

I tried various Smart assembly options, to try and get my program to run after going through the tool. For example, I just reduced it to dependency merging and embedding and pruning and now my application no longer runs. Seems to be related to web service calls.

There must be a set of rules for exclusions that we can apply to ensure error messages are displayed properly. Any docs outlining best practices for obfuscation?