Sorry, but are you talking about a packer or a protector?

Net protection will often be like Obfuscator plus some stuff.

You talk about Deploy.NET in your first post, and as you can see it is also listed in my post.

In fact i had a look at Deploy.NET ver 0.0.2.4 Beta way back in 2003.

What i can say it worked like a Obfuscatpr plus some Encryption/decryption routines.

Dotfuscator worked like a packer+protector, too because your project will have less size + Obfuscation.

Salamader translates your project.

xenoCode Enterprise has got string encryption, anti-ILDASM-routines, watermarking etc.

Of course i can't say which one was the first, but what i can say is that many of them use at least string encryption plus anti-tool-routines.

Bye