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

Name obfuscation completely defeats any attempts to access yFiles WPF 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 WPF need to be excluded from name obfuscation. This includes any XAML markup extension types and all types or type members whose names appear plain-text in any of the application's XAML files or GraphML files.

Several yFiles WPF types and type members are already excluded from name obfuscation since they are very likely to be used in a yFiles WPF-based application. 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 { ... }