Are Conditional Compilation Symbols Hackable

Question

I have an application and I will have two versions - Trial and Commercial. The trial will have some limited features compared to the Commercial version.However I need to make it so that when one has the trial version, it will be impossible for him to uncover the features in the full version. The simplest idea is to have two absolutely separate builds, however this will be hard to maintain(I think). The second idea I have is to build the solutions with a Conditional Compilation Symbols - Trial and Full. I will adapt the source to work this way and I will use #If statements. My question is if this is safe. As it seems the code which is not in the Full compilation symbol's #If statement will be excluded from the assembly but I need your help on this as I need to be sure. Thanks a lot

Answer 1

You are correct code excluded via conditional compilation will not be included in the resulting executable. In that way it is 'safe', i.e. it can't be hacked to execute code that isn't there. All managed code by it's nature is decompilable.

You cannot use conditional compilation to produce a single executable file that contains both states (defined/undefined) of your code and select behavior at runtime.