protect intellectual property

Hi, As a first step, you can obfuscate your dll so that it cannot be reverse engineered using .NET reflection. You have a community edition of the dotfuscator that ships with visual studio.net. You have other commercial ones that obfuscates code to such an extent that it's almost impossible to reverse engineer. To protect you SQL commands, the easiest and cheapest method would be to use Stored Procedures instead of hardcoded sql commands. In the case of SP's, the actual SQL directives are stored in the database server (which I presume to be safe) and only the SP names and the parameters are passed from the application to the database server. And it's not possible to make out your database structure using this information. SP's will also prevent any possible SQL injection attacks. But one of the best advantages is that you dont have to recompile and redeploy your application if you've done any minor database changes or you need to change your queryies.