ILMerge Best Practices

c# .net deployment ilmerge
James Pogran picture James Pogran · Aug 13, 2008 · Viewed 51.6k times · Source

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.

Answer

Lamar picture Lamar · Aug 29, 2008

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.

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