Where can I find location of generated file after doing Ngen?

c# .net clr ngen
paseena picture paseena · Apr 14, 2011 · Viewed 15.1k times · Source

I did Ngen on a C# executable. It was succesful, but I cannot figure out where the generated file is in my PC. MSDN says it should be in native image cache, still not able to figure out where it is..

EDIT : I want to run objdump on it, hence I need the physical file

EDIT2: my putput of running ngen is :

C:\Documents and Settings\nmea\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\Consol
eApplication4\ConsoleApplication4\bin\Release>ngen install ConsoleApplication4.e
xe
Microsoft (R) CLR Native Image Generator - Version 2.0.50727.3053
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Installing assembly C:\Documents and Settings\nmea\My Documents\Visual Studio
2008\Projects\ConsoleApplication4\ConsoleApplication4\bin\Release\ConsoleApplica
tion4.exe
    Compiling assembly C:\Documents and Settings\nmea\My Documents\Visual Stud
io 2008\Projects\ConsoleApplication4\ConsoleApplication4\bin\Release\ConsoleAppl
ication4.exe (CLR v2.0.50727) ...
ConsoleApplication4, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null

Answer

Samuel Neff picture Samuel Neff · Apr 14, 2011

The exact location will vary by version but it will be something similar to this:

C:\Windows\assembly\NativeImages_v2.0.50727_32\System.Web\ace3bede2f516f9e5bca620ad86cc063>System.Web.ni.dll

They start in C:\Windows\assembly and then there is a subfolder NativeImages_vXXX for each .NET version. Then there is a subfolder for each dll that has a native image. Under that another subfolder for a unique version identifier (so you can have multiple native images from different versions of the same dll). Finally the native dll itself.

Note that you cannot navigate to this directory in Windows Exlporer. Use cmd. In Explorer there is a shell extension that hides the details of how the GAC and native images work and just shows you a prettier UI.

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