Question

As the title says the deserialization fail after protecting my application with themida with the following exception :

Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1).
error CS0009: Metadata file ‘c:\Path\to\protected.exe’ could not be opened — ‘An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. ‘

Here’s the code I’m using for the deserialization (It works when the exe is not protected):

MyClass myClass;
try
{
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream(Data))
    {
        var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ComSec.MyClass));
        myClass = serializer.Deserialize(stream) as MyClass;
    }
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    return null;
}

Weird thing is that the code + themida protection works fine on my machine but it fails on the VM and on a co-worker’s machine

I’m using (same config as my co-worker) :

• VS2012 Professional
• Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
• Themida 2.1.2.0 x86 (With .Net support)

The VM is a fresh install of Windows 7 x86.

Answer 1

I ended up using the DataContract attribute and using a DataContractSerializer to Serialize and deserialize the object (It works now everywhere and with/without the protection ).

My research:

[DataContract(Name = "TestClass")]
public class TestClass
{
    [DataMember(Name = "Name")]
    public string Name { get; set; }
    [DataMember(Name = "Age")]
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

Serialization/Deserialization :

var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(TestClass));

using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
{
    serializer.WriteObject(stream, this);
    File.WriteAllBytes("TestClass.xml", stream.ToArray());
}

TestClass o = null;
using (var stream = new MemoryStream(File.ReadAllBytes("TestClass.xml")))
{
    o = serializer.ReadObject(stream) as TestClass;
}