Is there a way to compile C# files into one single file that is ready to give to the user?
One way is to use ILMerge. This will merge multiple assemblies into a single one (think combining all DLLs and a main exe into a single exe).
Yes :) But you must put all your sources into a single assembly and compile it to an EXE. Also note that the target system must also have the required .NET infrastructure installed.
Note that security policies on the target system may prevent the user from directly running your app.
Lastly, unless you "NGEN" your code, it will be jitted the first time it runs. This will incur some startup time costs. THese can be considerable in some instances.
If your looking to also merge the .Net assemblies required by your app, you can use something like This to even compile in System.dll, System.Windows.Forms.dll, etc, so the end user wont even need .Net installed.
I got this from a similar question (sorry to whoever posted the answer - I can't seem to find the original to link it here):
how to embed your application’s dependent DLLs inside your EXE file
It is an excerpt from Jeffrey Richter's CLR Via C#. I have not tried it yet but looks very promising. I think it will work with WPF as well (about to find out for myself).
Related
Does anyone know of any way to force an application to load a specific .NET class from a separate file, without having that application's source code? Like, say, if I want to make a change to a single class in mscorlib and see what happens in a certain application, I wouldn't want to have to make a wrapper DLL for every single class in mscorlib. One thing that brought this to mind is because I absolutely hate the Windows folder browser dialog, and I'd like to be able to write a replacement class for FolderBrowserDialog. Then whenever an application tries to use it it'll use mine instead.
I just found TypeForwardedToAttribute, but that requires access to source code. I'd like to be able to do this to an existing application I don't have any source code for.
Assembly redirection / publisher policy is for this purpose but it's not very likely that you can apply it to mscorlib, especially in a system-wide fashion. When assembly redirection is used, one can redirect a given assembly to a different version of the same assembly but the target assembly must have the same public key token as the original one. Since mscorlib is strongly named (in the GAC) it's not likely that you can re-sign it after your modifications.
Also, keep in mind that FolderBrowserDialog internally uses SHBrowseForFolder so if you somehow manage to redirect it or redirect mscorlib, you still only handled managed applications - any native applications will still use the underlying SHBrowseForFolder call and you'll end up seeing different folder dialogs in different applications.
Additionally (after reading your comment) your users may already be familiar with the 'regular' Browse for folder dialog - giving them a different one may end up confusing some of them if you do that. I'm not saying it's a great dialog (it's not) but standard behavior across all applications is better for users than a single application with a better dialog.
Why not create a new folder browser dialog instead in your own projects? It's not that hard to do so. Here's an article to start with - it has links to other articles that describe techniques to change the dialog (but only within a single application).
It might be possible using .Net policy settings. Check this out (extracted from Don Box's excellent Essential .Net). Look especially at Listing 2.4 and Figure 2.11. The only thing is I am not sure if you can override built-in .Net classes and assemblies using this technique.
Listing 2.4. Setting the Version Policy
Version policy can be specified at three levels: per application, per component, and per machine. Each of these levels gets an opportunity to process the version number, with the results of one level acting as input to the level below it. This is illustrated in Figure 2.11. Note that if both the application's and the machine's configuration files have a version policy for a given assembly, the application's policy is run first, and the resultant version number is then run through the machine-wide policy to get the actual version number used to locate the assembly. In this example, if the machine-wide configuration file redirected version 1.3.0.0 of Acme.HealthCare to version 2.0.0.0, the assembly resolver would use version 2.0.0.0 when version 1.2.3.4 was requested because the application's version policy maps version 1.2.3.4 to 1.3.0.0.
You can always try decompiling the dll with ILSpy. It allows you spit out a project file with generated source code from any .net dll.
You can then edit the generated source code and compile a modified dll.
Is there a way to keep any DLLs needed for my Visual C# program (such as SQLite) inside the actual EXE so it doesn't require the files to be present?
If not, can anyone show me how to make a wrapper for my program (independent of .NET, so maybe C++?) to copy/load required files to the working directory before starting the program itself.
What I intend to end up with is a single EXE file that can be deployed anywhere and set itself up like a transformer. All it requires is the following criteria:
SQLite is present
OpenHardwareMonitorLib is present
.NET 2.0 is installed (if not, offer install with redistributable package)
Microsoft provide a tool for merging DLLs. It's called ILMerge.
It doesn't always work, I believe certain things can cause problems. But it's definitely the easier option!
If the problem is redistribute only one file, you can create a "installer" exe, that unpack all your dependencies (from executable content).
If you don't want to leave all dlls in your production environment, you can merge all IL code in the main executable. you can use ILMerge (but it's not the only product that can do this)
You can merge the dependencies into the main executable. After your build completes you run an additional tool that combines the IL code into a single assembly.
ILMerge can do this but is a bit cumbersome to use.
Some (proprietary) tools can do this as well. I know of at least one obfuscator (DeepSea) that can do this. DeepSea also allows you to specify what you want to include and what types you want to expose from the resulting assembly.
Full disclosure: I know the guys that build DeepSea Obfuscator.
I guess you could embed the target assemblies as resources and then unpack them in some custom assembly resolution code?
Edit: there's an example of this here: Embedding assemblies inside another assembly
I would like to keep version in my .net applications and let the .net to manage it. I don't really understand how it works. Is the version number per project ? How .net manages versions? If anyone could please explain it briefly i will be grateful.
What I usually do is to keep a SolutionInfo.cs that contains all the attributes that are common for the projects of my solution, for example the version-number. I keep this file in the solution root.
I then link that file into the project (right click the project and Add->Exsiting item... -> Add as link (the little arrow on the add button)).
I then can increment the version number in a single place and it will be updated in all the projects that links that file.
For more information on that for example see: http://jebsoft.blogspot.com/2006/04/consistent-version-numbers-across-all.html
The version number is per-project (.csproj file), so per built .dll or .exe file. The version number is embedded in the .dll or .exe, and can be viewed using (for example) Windows Explorer by right-clicking on the file and selecting Properties.
MSDN contains an explanatory article about how to use AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/556041
[AssemblyVersion] is a very big deal in .NET. Every type in your program is imprinted with the assembly version, it is part of the type identity. In other words, when the version of your type changes then you should also change the assembly version. This forces all other assemblies that use your type to be recompiled.
One thing you can do is to let the build system automatically increment the version. You can't call this 'managing the version' by any stretch of imagination. Because now just rebuilding your assembly, even without making any change in the source code, will make your assembly incompatible with other code that uses the types in that assembly.
Clearly this can only work well if you recompile all the code in your solution.
Well, that's not great unless you like sword fighting. Furthermore, sometimes you want to make a simple bug-fix in your code. The result is an assembly that's still 100% compatible with the original version. And you don't need nor want to recompile everything else that uses it. You just want to send that one assembly to your customer. Clearly that can only work well if you don't let the version increment automatically.
So what you really need is some kind of tool that can magically determine that your source code, the publicly visible part of it, is no longer compatible with a previous version. Or the changes you made to the non-visible part of it are changing the behavior of the code too much to disallow other code that use your types to continue to use it without some changes in their code.
There's only one tool that I know of that can do this, the one we have between our ears.
There are a lot of posts on here about this, I'm using this code from another SO post and placing a delegate assignation in my Main() method. None of the other posts have directly answered my question.
I've got my third party assembly embedded as a resource but when I fire up the app:
I'm getting a TypeInitializationException with an inner of FileNotFoundException. It's trying to find the assembly on the file system and failing.
it's never getting to the Main method, where the event handler for AssemblyResolve is assigned
I have two assembly refs that are embedded in my Resources.resx, one is a third party tool (command line parser) and the other is a Library file where the meat of the application resides.
Maybe this isn't possible with a console app? Seems unlikely but I don't see a way around it.
Re: ILMerge etc: I'd like to get this done entirely in code without involving any tools. Reason: I don't want to have source code in the repository that requires other team members to install a tool that they probably don't have already. If that's not possible then ILMerge looks like the next best option.
Consider using ILMerge to merge the assemlies into one rather than embedding as a resource. This is download site for ILMerge.
You would merge your third party assemblies into your console app.
You could also look at application virtualization tools like XenoCode. They can package multiple assemblies (including the .net framework itself) into a stand alone executable.
If it is mixed mode assembly, it has to reside on the disk. Some limitation or something.
I'm working on a module for a CMS. This module is distributed as a class library DLL.
I have several utility libraries I'd like to use in this module. Is there anyway I can link these libraries statically so I won't have to distribute several DLL's (thereby distributing my utility libraries separately)?
I would like to have only one DLL.
You can merge your many DLLs with ILMERGE:
http://research.microsoft.com/~mbarnett/ILMerge.aspx
Haven't tried it myself. Hope it helps.
Download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22914587-B4AD-4EAE-87CF-B14AE6A939B0&displaylang=en
Brief Description (from download-page)
ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly. It works on executables and DLLs alike and comes with several options for controlling the processing and format of the output. See the accompanying documentation for details.
If you don't want to use ILMerge, see this page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/02/03/jeffrey-richter-excerpt-2-from-clr-via-c-third-edition.aspx
editor's note: Jeffrey Richter advices to put your dlls into exe file as resources (For each DLL file you add, display its properties and change its “Build Action” to “Embedded Resource.”). Then a custom class loader is needed to make the executable work (At runtime, the CLR won’t be able to find the dependent DLL assemblies, which is a problem. To fix this, when your application initializes, register a callback method with the AppDomain’s ResolveAssembly event).
Be sure to change the resourceName string to point to your actual resources. (e.g. change AssemblyLoadingAndReflection to your project name.)
The short answer for this is no!
You can not link in a dll during compilation.
I don't know if there is some subtle way to do this, but you would probably have to distribute the dlls along with your cms.
The best way to do this is to make some kind of re-distributable.