I have a solution with two C# projects: One WinForms application (exe) and one library (dll). Multiple external dll files are referenced. I would like to merge the output of my projects into one exe file, while keeping the other dll files separately, i.e. instead of
myApp.exe
myLib.dll
externalLib1.dll
externalLib2.dll
...
I would like to have
myMergedAppAndLib.exe
externalLib1.dll
externalLib2.dll
...
Is this actually possible?
I am aware of the ILMerge tool, but it seems to be deprecated and I don't know whether it is ok not to include all referenced dll files.
I am also aware of the publishing option in Visual Studio Produce single file, but to my understanding this will also merge the external dll files, right?
I cannot merge the two projects, because the library project is also used for a third project (another WinForms exe).
Related SO question: merge-dll-into-exe
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.
Using c# in visual studio 2012, I've created a class library FileTube.dll
It uses 3 other dll's.
I want to make a single dll to contain those thus I can publish my library via nuget.
I have tried 3 approaches all failing:
approach 1: In vistual studio, I set the "Embed Interop Assembly" to true, I get this error:
Error 2 Cannot embed interop types from assembly 'DiffieHellman.dll' because it is missing the 'GuidAttribute' attribute DiffieHellman.dll
approach 2: I used ILMergeGUI. It generated the code to use for ILMerge which fails with the error:
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Here is the command:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\ILMerge\ILMerge.exe"
/ndebug
/copyattrs
/targetplatform:4.0,"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319"
/out:"C:\temp\z.dll"
"C:\\FileTube\TestApp\bin\Debug\FileTube.dll"
"C:\\FileTube\TestApp\bin\Debug\DiffieHellman.dll"
"C:\\FileTube\TestApp\bin\Debug\Org.Mentalis.Security.dll"
"C:\\FileTube\TestApp\bin\Debug\Tamir.SharpSSH.dll"
approach 3:
I followed this tutorial
to use reflection to include the dll assemblies. The difference is that the tutorial has a main executable and is including dll in the executable while I'm trying to include dlls in my dll. so I added the reflection code to the class constructor of my main dll. It compiles but it would fail if I rename that external dll meaning that it's not really loading it.
Any ideas?
You have several options:
use ILMerge (free)
For howto see here and here
OR
use some tool like SmartAssembly (commercial)
it can embed and merge among other things (no need to change your source code)
OR
code that yourself in less than 10 lines (free but minimal source code change)
mark all needed dependencies as "embedded resource" - this way they are included in the EXE file... you need to setup an AssemblyResolve handler which at runtime reads from Resources and returns the needed DLLs to the .NET runtime...
(Answer copied from: How to merge multiple assemblies into one?)
I know a single file assembly consists of Manifest + IL + Resources. There is also an assembly type that groups its elements in multiple files, called a multi-file assembly. Visual Studio .NET IDE can only be used to create single-file assemblies, but Multifile assemblies can be created using command-line compilers.
This is all the information on the two types of assemblies that I could find, and google only returns http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z38d5bzk(v=vs.71).aspx
But I am not satisfied and I cannot clearly say what both of them actually are. I want to know:
What exactly is single file assembly? How to create, steps to create, how does it look?
What exactly is multifile assembly?How to create, steps to create, how does it look?
Basically, a "single-file" assembly is an assembly that has everything contained in one file. This will be a file that has a .DLL or .EXE extension, and is the compiled .NET project. Visual studio creates these from C# projects (either library or application).
With command line compilers, you can split an assembly into multiple parts - where a single assembly's Manifest contains the information required to find information that's part of the assembly, but stored in a separate file. For example, you can keep a resource image (ie: a .bmp) that is a large resource in its own file, so that it isn't necessary to load it just to open the assembly. Creation of multi-file assemblies is not supported by Visual Studio, but these will look like a DLL or EXE, plus zero or more netmodule files, plus zero or more resource files (which can be anything). The main DLL or EXE contains the manifest that specifies where the other files are located. The steps required to build this are detailed in How to: Build a Multifile Assembly.
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