There have been many times when I’ve thrown together a small utility app intended for situational use in specific scenarios. These scenarios are usually of a one-and-done nature, where they need to be done once and that’s it. It doesn’t make sense to have an installer that deploys the app to a permanent location in Program Files. What I really want is to have an EXE that I can copy to the desktop on a remote machine, use it, and junk it. There’s a wrinkle, though: the apps usually have some external dependencies, so it’s typically an EXE plus a handful of DLLs.
It’s not a huge problem, I just keep the EXE and its dependencies in a ZIP archive or folder. When I need the app, I copy the archive/folder. This works fine, but it’s not as simple as I’d like. It’s also error-prone, since another user may not realize that the accompanying assemblies are required dependencies. It’d be nice to roll the EXE and its dependencies into a single assembly, and that’s exactly what ILMerge does!
ILMerge is a Microsoft Research project that allows you to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. It’s a command-line tool, but you can also use it programmatically.
Here’s the basic command-line usage:
ILMerge.exe /out:Target.dll PrimaryAssembly.dll ExternalAssembly1.dll ExternalAssembly2.dll etc.
I used ILMerge to consolidate a WCF client proxies library with several data contract assemblies. It worked great! Now, instead of telling service consumers to copy the client proxies assembly plus a short list of contract assemblies, I can tell them to grab the one consolidated assembly to get everything they need. Writing an app to consume my services is done with one new reference–to the consolidated assembly–and less than 10 lines of code. A previously complicated process is now remarkably simple!
Unfortunately, it sounds like ILMerge doesn’t work for WPF assemblies, but the ILMerge website offers the following alternative:
If you cannot use ILMerge because you are trying to merge WPF assemblies, then here is a great way for you to get the same effect, courtesy of Jeffrey Richter: embed the dlls you want to merge as resources and load them on demand! In many ways, this is a better technique than using ILMerge, so I strongly urge you to check it out, even if ILMerge is working for your scenario.
ILMerge can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center here. It’s also available through NuGet. I haven’t tried that out yet, but I’m intrigued. I’ll probably try using NuGet to include it with each project I intend on using it with to ensure availability in builds and workspaces.
adamprescott.net 