Hi. I'm curious about signing .Net assemblies. I have several projects where I am writing multiplayer network games. I'd like to make the games open source, because I think open source is good for the game development community, but I don't want to open my game up to hacks. As I understand it, you can sign an assembly to keep anyone from messing with it (disassembling/recompiling). So if I were not going to release any source, signing would be a good way to prevent some types of client side hacks. Is this the case? Or am I misunderstanding how it works? Also, if I released the full client source, does assembly signing provide any benefit? I don't understand enough of how it works to even know what these benefits might be. My feeling is that it wouldn't, because there is no way to verify the client remotely (or is there?) Anyone play with this?

Signing an assembly means that you add some kind of identity to the assembly. Another person can assure that nobody modifed or replaced this assembly by checking if it has your identity.

If you have compiled a game with a signed networking assembly, the game tests if the networking assembly has your identity on execution before the networking assembly is loaded. That way you can't replace or modify the networking assembly. However if you publish all your source code, it is possible to compile the game without using signed assemblies...

However, that's not a big problem, since you just guarantee that the compiled game with your identiy uses assemblies with your identity.

However, over the net you have to add additional checks, since sombody could modify and recompile the client. So you have to think how you can assure that you communicate with a non-modifed client... (but actually that has nothing to do with signed assemblies)