I have an app that references a .dll that was built with Costura/Fody i.e The dll has all its references embedded. When I run the console app, the references from the dll are not unpacked so the console app throws an exception saying missing .dll etc. as it needs those resources to run.
i.e. AssemblyA.dll embeds MyAssembly.dll when built with Costura/Fody. ConsoleAppC references and embeds AssemblyA.dll but also needs MyAssembly.dll to run. I do have a reference to MyAssembly.dll in ConsoleAppC so that it will compile (but CopyLocal is set to false). I was thinking that MyAssembly.dll would be made available to ConsoleAppC when AssemblyA.dll's embedded resources are unpacked?
This is not working but is my scenario valid in any way or can you only utilise embedded resources from ConsoleAppC and not the ones that were embedded in AssemblyA.dll?
Thanks in advance for any help
Mike
What you're trying to do isn't possible with Costura.Fody. What Costura does is embed libraries directly into the main assembly. This means that if you embed the built assembly into another project, it can't see the sub assemblies.
For example, consider the following project structure:
AssemblyA
Foo.cs
References:
SubAssembly1.dll
SubAssembly2.dll
SubAssembly3.dll
AssemblyB
Assume that Costura.Fody is used to embed the sub assemblies in AssemblyA, creating a single DLL file, AssemblyA.dll
If you embed AssemblyA.dll in AssemblyB, then you will not be able to access classes in SubAssembly1.dll. You will only be able to see any of the classes that are directly in AssemblyA.dll, such as those contained in Foo.cs - you will not be able to see any of the libraries referenced by/embedded in AssemblyA.dll.
See this answer to a similar question, where the answerer suggests using ILMerge instead.
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Embedding DLLs in a compiled executable
I have a c# winforms application along with a few depending .dlls and a dependant external .exe.
Is it possible to somehow complile all of them into one executable (not installer) just stand alone executable?
From VS 2010 Ultimate if possible?
In short: the only way that may work is to add all external files as an embedded resource and use ILMerge.
Option #1: the following steps show how to embed a resource file Inside Visual Studio :
Go to Solution Explorer,
Right click the resource file,
GO to Build Actions: Select Embedded Resource.
You will have that file reference inside the exe. Later you can use Reflection and get the resource when you run your application. Borrowed Source Code from here:
Option #2 with managed dll's:
For the managed DLLs you have a couple of options:
Use ILMerge. ILMerge has a nice GUI interface that can be found [here]7]
Embebed them as a resource, see this article for details.
Check out the following CodeProject article that explains this .
ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into one target assembly. The first assembly in the list of input assemblies is the primary assembly. When the primary assembly is an executable, then the target assembly is created as an executable with the same entry point as the primary assembly. Also, if the primary assembly has a strong name, and a .snk file is provided, then the target assembly is re-signed with the specified key so that it also has a strong name.
ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly.
I have a created a visual studio 2010 project that creates a windows form - it references numerous other dll's.
How can I wrap this up in to a single .exe file?
ILMerge is what you are looking for with the /t:exe option.
A sample call would look like this:
ilmerge.exe exefile.exe [dlls-to-internalize.dll ..] /out:exefile-out.exe /t:exe
A sample usage of using ILMerge to pack up multiple dlls into one and internalizing them can be found here: dotlesscss buildfile
More info on using ILMerge can be found on the ILMerge Website.
You can also get it through NuGet via Chocolatey
It allows you to pack multiple .NET assemblies into one file by rewriting the references.
You can also internalize your dependencies in case you are supplying a library to someone and don't want to cause dependency conflicts with libraries you are internally using.
As posted ILMerge is one option, another is "SmartAssembly" from RedGate etc.
What all these DO NOT do is internalizing native DLLs - that's a limitation in the Windows API... so any dependency which is a native DLL has to be shipped along with the EXE.
1. Select Configuration Manager and check parameter such as debug/release or x86/new.
2.Select Release instead of debug from drop down menu near debug button(Visual studio framework).
3. Click on build and then build yourApplicationName.
4. Goto Your program folder->bin->release->yourApplicationName.exe.
5. yourApplicationName.exe is ready to use.
Thanks
Go to Your Application->bin->dubug->yourapplicationname.exe
It is automatically generated but exe from release folder is more faster than the debug due to less information of debug.
I'm trying to add a generated COM interop assembly project to my solution, and the only solution I could come up with feels really nasty.
I created a .net dll project, removed all .cs files from it and then created the following post-build event:
call "$(DevEnvDir)..\tools\vsvars32.bat"
midl.exe $(ProjectDir)relative-path-to-my-idl\MyComName.idl /tlb MyComName.tlb
tlbimp.exe /keyfile:path-to-my-key\k.snk MyComName.tlb
Essentially, I first create an empty DLL, then overwrite it with a real interop DLL. And there's no dependency management here - it's created every time.
Is there a better way to do this?
The MIDL compilation can be handled by making the COM interop project a managed C++ project (instead of a C# project) then adding the idl and h to the project as regular source files.
You can overcome the dependency problem by using MSBuild tasks directly instead of a PostBuild batch file, which line up nicely with the MSBuild dependency system.
However, why are you generating the file manually from an idl? When I need COM interop, I just import it and put the generated assembly (*.Interop.dll) into version control. This way, you always have the version you need and it's already ready to use, and Visual Studio can find the interop DLL before the first build, i.e. Intellisense is there right from the beginning.
Now some people won't like to check in a binary file, which I typically agree with, but well, if it works... :)
Of course, my method won't work if building the COM server is part of building the solution. In this case, just try to put the generation into the MSBuild script to get rid of the dependency thing, unless Visual Studio accepts a reference to a solution-internal non-.NET-COM project.
Do you use ILMerge? Do you use ILMerge to merge multiple assemblies to ease deployment of dll's? Have you found problems with deployment/versioning in production after ILMerging assemblies together?
I'm looking for some advice in regards to using ILMerge to reduce deployment friction, if that is even possible.
I use ILMerge for almost all of my different applications. I have it integrated right into the release build process so what I end up with is one exe per application with no extra dll's.
You can't ILMerge any C++ assemblies that have native code.
You also can't ILMerge any assemblies that contain XAML for WPF (at least I haven't had any success with that). It complains at runtime that the resources cannot be located.
I did write a wrapper executable for ILMerge where I pass in the startup exe name for the project I want to merge, and an output exe name, and then it reflects the dependent assemblies and calls ILMerge with the appropriate command line parameters. It is much easier now when I add new assemblies to the project, I don't have to remember to update the build script.
Introduction
This post shows how to replace all .exe + .dll files with a single combined .exe. It also keeps the debugging .pdb file intact.
For Console Apps
Here is the basic Post Build String for Visual Studio 2010 SP1, using .NET 4.0. I am building a console .exe with all of the sub-.dll files included in it.
"$(SolutionDir)ILMerge\ILMerge.exe" /out:"$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).all.exe" "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).exe" "$(TargetDir)*.dll" /target:exe /targetplatform:v4,C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319 /wildcards
Basic hints
The output is a file "AssemblyName.all.exe" which combines all sub-dlls into one .exe.
Notice the ILMerge\ directory. You need to either copy the ILMerge utility into your solution directory (so you can distribute the source without having to worry about documenting the install of ILMerge), or change the this path to point to where ILMerge.exe resides.
Advanced hints
If you have problems with it not working, turn on Output, and select Show output from: Build. Check the exact command that Visual Studio actually generated, and check for errors.
Sample Build Script
This script replaces all .exe + .dll files with a single combined .exe. It also keeps the debugging .pdb file intact.
To use, paste this into your Post Build step, under the Build Events tab in a C# project, and make sure you adjust the path in the first line to point to ILMerge.exe:
rem Create a single .exe that combines the root .exe and all subassemblies.
"$(SolutionDir)ILMerge\ILMerge.exe" /out:"$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).all.exe" "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).exe" "$(TargetDir)*.dll" /target:exe /targetplatform:v4,C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319 /wildcards
rem Remove all subassemblies.
del *.dll
rem Remove all .pdb files (except the new, combined pdb we just created).
ren "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).all.pdb" "$(TargetName).all.pdb.temp"
del *.pdb
ren "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).all.pdb.temp" "$(TargetName).all.pdb"
rem Delete the original, non-combined .exe.
del "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).exe"
rem Rename the combined .exe and .pdb to the original project name we started with.
ren "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).all.pdb" "$(TargetName).pdb"
ren "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName).all.exe" "$(TargetName).exe"
exit 0
We use ILMerge on the Microsoft application blocks - instead of 12 seperate DLL files, we have a single file that we can upload to our client areas, plus the file system structure is alot neater.
After merging the files, I had to edit the visual studio project list, remove the 12 seperate assmeblies and add the single file as a reference, otherwise it would complain that it couldnt find the specific assembly. Im not too sure how this would work on post deployment though, could be worth giving it a try.
I know this is an old question, but we not only use ILMerge to reduce the number of dependencies but also to internalise the "internal" dependencies (eg automapper, restsharp, etc) that are used by the utility. This means they are completely abstracted away, and the project using the merged utility doesn't need to know about them. This again reduces the required references in the project, and allows it to use / update its own version of the same external library if required.
We use ILMerge on quite a few projects. The Web Service Software Factory, for example produces something like 8 assemblies as its output. We merge all of those DLLs into a single DLL so that the service host will only have to reference one DLL.
It makes life somewhat easier, but it's not a big deal either.
We had the same problem with combining WPF dependencies .... ILMerge doesn't appear to deal with these. Costura.Fody worked perfectly for us however and took about 5 minutes to get going... a very good experience.
Just install with Nuget (selecting the correct default project in the Package Manager Console). It introduces itself into the target project and the default settings worked immediately for us.
It merges the all DLLs marked "Copy Local" = true and produces a merged .EXE (alongside the standard output), which is nicely compressed in size (much less than the total output size).
The license is MIT as so you can modify/distribute as required.
https://github.com/Fody/Costura/
Note that for windows GUI programs (eg WinForms) you'll want to use the /target:winexe switch. The /target:exe switch creates a merged console application.
I'm just starting out using ILMerge as part of my CI build to combine a lot of finely grained WCF contracts into a single library. It works very well, however the new merged lib can't easily co-exist with its component libraries, or other libs that depend on those component libraries.
If, in a new project, you reference both your ILMerged lib and also a legacy library that depends on one of the inputs you gave to ILMerge, you'll find that you can't pass any type from the ILMerged lib to any method in the legacy library without doing some sort of type mapping (e.g. automapper or manual mapping). This is because once everything's compiled, the types are effectively qualified with an assembly name.
The names will also collide but you can fix that using extern alias.
My advice would be to avoid including in your merged assembly any publicly available lib that your merged assembly exposes (e.g. via a return type, method/constructor parameter, field, property, generic...) unless you know for sure that the user of your merged assembly does not and will never depend on the free-standing version of the same library.
We ran into problems when merging DLLs that have resources in the same namespace. In the merging process one of the resource namespaces was renamed and thus the resources couldn't be located. Maybe we're just doing something wrong there, still investigating the issue.
We just started using ILMerge in our solutions that are redistributed and used in our other projects and so far so good. Everything seems to work okay. We even obfuscated the packaged assembly directly.
We are considering doing the same with the MS Enterprise Library assemblies.
The only real issue I see with it is versioning of individual assemblies from the package.
I recently had issue where I had ilmerged assembly in the assembly i had some classes these were being called via reflection in Umbraco opensource CMS.
The information to make the call via reflection was taken from db table that had assembly name and namespace of class that implemented and interface. The issue was that the reflection call would fail when dll was il merged however if dll was separate it all worked fine. I think issue may be similar to the one longeasy is having?
It seems to me like the #1 ILMerge Best Practice is Don't Use ILMerge. Instead, use SmartAssembly. One reason for this is that the #2 ILMerge Best Practice is to always run PEVerify after you do an ILMerge, because ILMerge does not guarantee it will correctly merge assemblies into a valid executable.
Other ILMerge disadvantages:
when merging, it strips XML Comments (if I cared about this, I would use an obfuscation tool)
it doesn't correctly handle creating a corresponding .pdb file
Another tool worth paying attention to is Mono.Cecil and the Mono.Linker [2] tool.
[2]: http:// www.mono-project.com/Linker