I know I’m not the first person to ask this question on Stack Overflow and I’m sure I won’t be the last. But, after spending hours researching how to do this and then physically trying to do it, I’m near ready to give up.
I have a .NET Framework 4, C#, WinForms application that builds to an executable. I rely on many many many dlls. The dlls fall into multiple categories.
- Libraries I have written with no dependencies of their own
- Libraries I have written with dependencies on other libraries I’ve written
- Libraries I have written with dependencies on third party dlls
- Third party stand alone dlls
- Third party dlls with their own dependencies on other dlls
So after I compile my application I have a directory with an executable and approximately 15 dlls.
I want to pack all the dlls into a single executable so that I can simply distribute a single executable.
I know that IlMerge is the typically suggested application to use for this, but I’m curious if there is something easier to use that is more intuitive and works accross both WinForms and WPF.
In the end, I went an entirely different direction.
I decided to use the Costura Visual Studio Extensions located here.
These extensions use a combination of two methods
What’s nice here is that you simply install the extensions into Visual Studio. After doing that, for any project where you want to pack your DLLs into a single executable, simply select the project, click Project on the menu bar, Costura, Configure, and then OK. It will ask you to reload the project – click yes. Now whenever you build the project it will create just a single executable (or DLL if you are doing it on a library). Couldn’t be more easy.