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Asked: 2026-05-24T19:26:30+00:00

There are 5 console apps working off each other’s outputs and are separately installed

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There are 5 console apps working off each other’s outputs and are separately installed on my computer (C# 4.0, I am the author) . Management would like to distribute this suite of apps to other users, but aren’t thrilled about asking non-tech users to install/configure 5 separate applications. Is there any way I can compile each program down into a .dll and reference them through a single master application?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Q. The main issue seems to be that you don’t want 5 separate installation steps?

    A. Make an installer for the suite 🙂 Use any MSI builder (WiX, Visual Studio setup projects, InstallShield, and many others; Heck, you could even do an XCOPY deployment in most cases)

    Q. How do I directly invoke these programs from within a single process?

    A. Options:

    1. Load the assemblies in your AppDomain.
    2. Use a separate AppDomain in case of name(space) conflicts or version conflicts

    Q. How do I optionally ‘hide’ the presence of the external console apps from view

    A. Look at ilmerge to possibly combine the ‘external’ assemblies so they aren’t visible anymore. If you can’t use ilmerge (conflicts, or e.g. WPF apps) you might embed them as resources and load them on demand as per 1. and 2. above

    Update: https://libz.codeplex.com/ is a nice looking project that makes this easy (haven’t tried it myself)

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