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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T12:14:34+00:00

If Ngen doesn’t protect my application, when would I reasonably expect to use this

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If Ngen doesn’t protect my application, when would I reasonably expect to use this application in my career?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Jeffrey Richter wrote a great piece in his book, I don’t know if the third release has it, but here is a great piece he wrote in 2002 about Ngen’ing which is still relevant.

    Highlights:

    Meanwhile, there are several potential
    problems with respect to NGen’d files:

    • No Intellectual Property Protection. Many people believe that
      it might be possible to ship NGend
      files without shipping the files
      containing the original IL code
      thereby keeping their intellectual
      property a secret. Unfortunately, this
      is not possible. At runtime, the CLR
      requires access to the assemblys
      metadata and the NGend files do not
      contain the metadata.

    • NGend Files Can Get Out-Of-Sync. When the CLR loads an
      NGen’d file it compares a number of
      attributes about the
      previously-compile code and the
      current execution environment. If any
      of the attributes don’t match then the
      NGen’d file cannot be used and the
      normal JIT compiler process is used
      instead.

    • Poor Administration. NGen’d file are not automatically deleted when an
      assembly is uninstalled adversely
      affecting the .NET Frameworks easy
      administration and XCOPY deployment
      story.

    • Inferior Load-Time Performance (Rebasing). When Windows loads an
      NGend file, it checks to see if the
      file loads at its preferred base
      address. If the file cant load at its
      preferred base address, then Windows
      relocates the file, fixing-up all of
      the memory address references. This is
      extremely time consuming because
      Windows must load the entire file into
      memory and modify various bytes within
      the file. For more information about
      rebasing please see my book:
      Programming Applications for Microsoft
      Windows, 4th Edition (Microsoft
      Press).

    Inferior Execution-Time Performance.

    When compiling code, NGen cant make as many assumptions about the execution environment as the JIT compiler can. This causes NGen.exe to produce code with a number of memory-reference indirections that aren’t necessary for JIT compiled code

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