Babel for dotnet maui.

[stefandb1995]

Hi!

I have a dotnet maui application that I want to obfuscate with Babel. I've got 2 projects that I want to merge (using Merge Assemblies). I found an old post on Xamarin.Android (dotnet/android#4202) that helped with the timings. In the bin folder of my main project I can see the merged .dll. Decompiling it does show that they are merged and obfuscated, but when I force a crash on the app and write the stacktrace to logcat I can read all of the code. By all accounts the merged dll isn't used in the apk, but I'm not sure what exactly I need to change.

Some code (so that we don't need to dig through the old post):

`
<_BeforeLinkAssemblies>
$(_BeforeLinkAssemblies);
Obfuscate;
</_BeforeLinkAssemblies>

<Target Name="Obfuscate">
	<ItemGroup>
		<MainAndroidAssembly Remove="@(MainAndroidAssembly)" />
		<MainAndroidAssembly Include="@(ResolvedAssemblies)" Condition="'%(Filename)' == '$(AssemblyName)'" KeepMetadata="none" />
	</ItemGroup>

	<ItemGroup>
		<MergeAssemblies Remove="@(MergeAssemblies)" />
		<MergeAssemblies Include="@(ResolvedAssemblies)" Condition="'%(Filename)' == 'MergedAssembly1' Or '%(Filename)' == 'MergedAssembly2' Or '%(Filename)' == 'MergedAssembly3'" KeepMetadata="none" />
	</ItemGroup>

`

Then we have the obfuscation code. This should really matter, as there are other ways to merge assemblies.

<ItemGroup> <ResolvedAssemblies Remove="@(MergeAssemblies)" /> <ResolvedUserAssemblies Remove="@(MergeAssemblies)" /> </ItemGroup>

Any help would be appreciated!

[stefandb1995]

@bravekit I see you have a repo trying to figure this out as well?

[bravekit]

Hi,
yes, I was trying to figure out how to merge assemblies with Babel for my MAUI project. Eventually I decided to merge the assemblies just in my solution, because the "merge" function is available only with Babel Enterprise version (I have a trial licence now, but later I'm going to use a standard Babel licence).
Anyway, I contacted to Babel's support, and Alberto sent me this:

The publish phase may vary depending on the target framework and platform. You might find the following task useful to include after ComputeFilesToPublish:

  <Target Name="UpdateBabelFilesToPublish"

          Condition="'$(BabelPublishEnabled)' == 'true'"

          DependsOnTargets="ObfuscateSettings"

          AfterTargets="ComputeFilesToPublish">

 

    <PropertyGroup>

      <MergedAssembliesRegEx>@(MergeAssembly->'%(FileName)(%(Extension)|.pdb|.xml)', '|')</MergedAssembliesRegEx>

      <EmbedAssembliesRegEx>@(EmbedAssembly->'%(FileName)(%(Extension)|.pdb|.xml)', '|')</EmbedAssembliesRegEx>

    </PropertyGroup>

 

    <!-- Remove merged and embedded assemblies from file to publish -->

    <ItemGroup>

      <ResolvedFileToPublish Remove="@(ResolvedFileToPublish->'%(Identity)')" Condition="('$(EmbedAssembliesRegEx)' != '') And $([System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex]::IsMatch('%(FileName)%(Extension)', '$(EmbedAssembliesRegEx)'))" />

      <ResolvedFileToPublish Remove="@(ResolvedFileToPublish->'%(Identity)')" Condition="('$(MergedAssembliesRegEx)' != '') And $([System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex]::IsMatch('%(FileName)%(Extension)', '$(MergedAssembliesRegEx)'))" />

    </ItemGroup>

    <Message Text="Babel publish files: @(ResolvedFileToPublish)" Importance="normal" />

  </Target>

I haven't tried it yet...

[stefandb1995]

Doesn't look like this timing step works for MAUI. It crashes the app when trying to use ComputeFilesToPublish.