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
Related
This is a simple question. I just can't run my program if the Newtonsoft.Json.dll is not in the program folder. Why this? I've tried adding the reference, added the file to the project root, added to the resources folder, but nothing worked. How to run the program without the Newtonsoft.Json.dll in the program folder? I'm developing in a Windows Form Application.
UPDATE
Problem solved, thanks to spender for introducing me the ILMerge, a really really nice NuGet package that can combine third party dlls to a single executable binary file. For who wants to make a standalone application, just use ILMerge. Rapid, easy and extremely useful. See ya!
Usually, if your program uses a DLL, then you'll need that DLL in the app folder (or in the user path, or the GAC).
The conventional method of distributing multiple files is with an installer. You can write one using either WiX or the VS Installer Projects extension. Now all your output files get installed in one go along with all the other goodness that comes with an installed program. I have a strong preference for this method.
However, there are alternatives:
Download the source and copy the source into your main project, then it will be compiled into your main assembly (make sure you check that this is permitted by the license).
Use ILMerge to combine all your assemblies into a single binary.
If you don't want to reference dll in your program, you can install it to GAC on client machine but I don't understand which the context you want
If you just need some JSON serialization. Can you switch out your functionality with the JavascriptSerializer class which is installed with .Net?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.script.serialization.javascriptserializer(v=vs.90).aspx
My case: I have an app.exe and several dlls for it -- a.dll, b.dll, c.dll, etc (they come from single VS solution which consists of many projects). I would like to merge (ilmerge) all dlls into one so I would have: app.exe + x.dll.
Now, there is a problem -- the application expects to have all dlls so when I put just single file x.dll it won't run. So how to "redirect" application to use one x.dll -- is it possible at all?
The one solution I am aware is deleting all references to projects in Visual Studio and add instead reference to merged dll. But this would disable dependency chaining while recompiling solution.
Btw. I cannot merge exe and dlls together because this is a wpf app, and ilmerge cannot handle it.
You could instead of creating 3 DLLs you could create 3 .NetModules and turn them into one DLL. It would require some editing of the actual CSPROJ files because creating .NetModules is not currently integrated into the MSBuild system, but it can be done.
You can think of a .NetModule as a kind of static library in C/C++. Of course there are differences but overall the concept is similar. They are most common when trying to make a single DLL containing multiple .NET languages, but they will work for you as well. Check them out here.
I'll recommend if you read this blog. Its an alternative to ILMerge when you need to merge WPF assemblies.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/02/03/jeffrey-richter-excerpt-2-from-clr-via-c-third-edition.aspx
I'm using subversion and nant (and visual studio IDE)
I've been following the suggested project structure at http://blog.jpboodhoo.com/NAntStarterSeries.aspx which advocates self contained subversion directories where a developer can do a checkout and immediately build a project in a single step.
My repo structure is like:
/Repo
/MainProject
/trunk
/doc <-- documentation
/lib <-- binary-only DLLs
/src <-- source code for MainProject
/tools <-- holds tools like nant, nunit, etc
...
/ClassLibrary1
/trunk
/doc
/lib
/src
/tools
...
/ClassLibrary2
/trunk
/doc
/lib
/src
/tools
What's not clear is how to structure a project that has class libraries which in turn reference third party library dll's themselves.
Currently, I have a main project with a working directory like
Example:
/MainProject
/build
/lib
/src
/MainProject
/ClassLibrary1 <-- svn external to svn://server/repo/ClassLibrary1/trunk/src
/ClassLibrary2 <-- svn external to svn://server/repo/ClassLibrary2/trunk/src
/tools
...
When building MainProject, I compile the class libraries and output the dll's to the build folder. However, the class libraries themselves have 3rd party binary-only DLL's that they reference.
My questions is in order to build the MainProject I have to somehow get the 3rd party DLL's from the class libraries into the build output. How do I do that?
Thoughts:
1. Should I store copies of these 3rd party dlls in the MainProject's lib folder?
2. Or should my svn:external reference be to the trunk of the class library project rather than the src so that I can access the class library's lib folder?
3. Should I use the subversion 1.6 feature of svn:externals to individual files?
Personally I bring in the trunk of the referenced libraries.
(Actually, I bring in the root of a tag, but that's beside the point).
If you keep a separate copy of the required dll's, then you're not really allowing the referenced library to determine what it needs for itself because all that logic is duplicated in the project. The same thing happens if you use multiple externals references or file externals to bring in the code and the dll's.
My principle here is that - the library knows what it needs, a single external reference to the library can get that library and everything it needs.
That way if you change the library's references, you can be confident that any and all projects will just pick that up. (if the IDE doesn't support this, that's the IDE's problem, not subverion's). You can also be confident as a project that if you change the version of the library you're pointing to, you'll automatically get the right references as well, and don't need to go debugging build failures to work out what's gone wrong.
Should I store copies of these 3rd party dlls in the MainProject's lib folder? I prefer to store any external libraries in a binaries directory under trunk but next to source...or call it references, dependencies, etc. This then allows any developer to get latest and all that is needed will come down. It doesn't need to be part of the project per se. It just needs to be accessible when the build is performed.
Or should my svn:external reference be to the trunk of the class library project rather than the src so that I can access the class library's lib folder? I don't prefer this approach as it makes the process of getting a new developer up and running more convoluted. I think an assembly can go into its own repository when it has a level of importance on to itself. But I would never reference its output. It should have a build process wrapped around it that promotes a mechanism to "deploy" the output to the above references or dependencies directory. However automating the deployment like that might be fraught with issues. It would be better if the assembly had its own process around it. And when a new version of the assembly were released it would be manually embraced by a developer on the project that needed it. They could then test it, accept it, and place it into their build process. Obviously if that assembly changes on a daily basis some automation may be required.
Should I use the subversion 1.6 feature of svn:externals to individual files? No. I prefer to keep a project/solution as a self contained entity. Having tenticals spread out all of the place makes dependencies more painful. Keep silos as hard as possible...bring new things in as manual as possible...or as manual as the frequency that things change will allow.
I had a similar need and found a short-and-sweet answer in TortoiseSVN's documentation :
http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/nightly/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-howto-common-projects.html
Our solution has several (10+) C# projects. Each has a reference to the CAB extension library, with the reference pointing to the DLLs in the library's release folders. Each project has between four and seven such references.
We'd like to make some changes to the library; but to debug the changes, we'll need to build a debug version of the library and refer to that. I'd like to add the library's projects to our solution and change each of the DLL references to a project reference.
Is it possible to perform a 'find and replace' on the existing references, or will I have to do it by hand?
There isn't such a feature in the VS IDE.
However, as a .csproj file is just an XML document it is possible to do such a global search and replace in a scripted fashion e.g. by changing one file to observe the before and after states then running sed over the remainder.
For a one-off, going to the extent of writing a script to load the XML and making the substitutions by DOM manipulation is probably overkill.
Take a look at Jared's answer to this SO thread. That approach will likely work for you.
If you download CI Factory, it just so happens that there is a nant function in there called FixUpThirdPartyRefs which you could use or tweak to help you do this. So you could just setup nant and use that function.
It is part of the power tools with CI Factory: http://www.cifactory.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=41
Why don't you just replace DLLs in library's release folder with debug version temporary ? I assume that you have local development environment.
EDIT:
You could:
1. develop all time with debug version of library
2. make updating references in *.csproj more flexible
3. make file system location of library files more flexible
On point 3: If the path to your library dlls contains "release" and if debug and release library folder structure is the same than change from release could be made by just renaming folder "release" to "release.original" and "debug" to "release".
I would probably choose option 1 and all time develop with debug assemblies. Release build would use just for final testing and deploy to customer. Debug and release dlls are not that different.
I have a C# Application that uses some other Assemblies, so when I compile, I end up with my .exe and 2 or 3 other .dll Files. Ideally, I only want 1 .exe file. At the moment I use ILMerge for that, but as the Assemblies that I use are Open Source (and under the same license), I wonder if there is an easy way to add them to my Solution and compile them into the .exe?
What I do not want:
Creating a Subfolder in my main .exe and copying all the other files into it
Adding it as a separate solution but then add it to my .exe Project with "Add as Link"
I suppose that ILMerge is more or less doing exactly what I want, but if I can apply the merging on a compiler level already, that would be what I want.
Needless to say, the referenced assemblies have no main() function, so no clashes are to be expected.
You could add the dependencies as embedded resources and then load them manually but this would require a code change so it's not ideal.
I think that ILMerge is your best option here.
As I never tried this, I don't know if this will work and/or meet your expectations, but, there's an option of compiling .net code to a netmodule, instead of an assembly, and then those modules, theoretically, could be added to other assemblies, You can read about it here and here.