Apart from the need of protection for .NET code in general, a yFiles.NET licensee in particular is bound to the code protection requirements as stated in the license terms: the Software License Agreement for yFiles.NET (see section 2.1 Rights and Limitations) explicitly requires that all essential class, method, and field names of classes contained in the yFiles.NET library are obfuscated. The obfuscation's intended purpose, namely prevention of any unauthorized use of the library's functionality via the publicly available yFiles.NET API, is also expressed.

Name obfuscation completely defeats any attempts to access yFiles.NET functionality that is part of an application via publicly available class or method names.

In order for an application to function properly, some of the types in yFiles.NET are excluded from name obfuscation. Mainly, this includes all types or type members whose names appear plain-text in GraphML files.

The following types are excluded as a factory default:

These excludes are realized via attribute annotations at the type level using the .NET framework's System.Reflection.ObfuscationAttribute (see Example A.2, “Obfuscation attribute annotation”).

[Obfuscation(StripAfterObfuscation = false, 
             Exclude = true, 
             ApplyToMembers = false)]
public class GraphControl : CanvasControl { ... }